\u2018Give us your money\u2019<\/p>\n
The two victims were known to Knight and Gray through mutual friends.<\/p>\n
About 11am on February 3, 2024, the female victim\u2018s partner was out on his driveway when the pair drove up. Gray, who was driving, nearly hit him.<\/p>\n
The pair got out and went up to the ranch slider to the home.<\/p>\n
The man ran inside and tried, unsuccessfully, to hold the ranchslider shut.<\/p>\n
Gray picked up a hammer off the ground and forced the door open, and the pair went in.<\/p>\n
Gray ran through to the kitchen and into the lounge where he kicked the wheelchair-bound victim in the ankleas she sat in a La-Z-Boy.<\/p>\n
He then demanded money from the male victim that he claimed he was owed for an alleged drug debt. Knight yelled at the woman , demanding money. She also tried to take some property from her.<\/p>\n
The woman resisted, and Knight elbowed her in the face before taking cigarettes and $100 cash.<\/p>\n
As the couple left, they threatened to return to steal the victims\u2019 television and stereo if they did not get their money back.<\/p>\n
Gray then tried to smash the ranchslider by throwing chairs at it.<\/p>\n
When questioned by police, Gray admitted his role and said he was in a \u201cbad head space\u201d at the time, while Knight declined to comment.<\/p>\n
Gray was jailed in April last year for two years and nine months after earlier accepting a sentence indication.<\/p>\n
\u2018She was not involved in the planning\u2019<\/p>\n
At the time of the offending, Knight also had another one of her children in hospital.<\/p>\n
Her counsel, Stephen Taylor, said Knight was in Waikato Hospital due to complications from her birth, having lost a \u201csignificant amount of blood\u201d.<\/p>\n
She was in observation while her newborn was in NICU.<\/p>\n
Asked by Judge Tini Clark how she ended up getting involved, Taylor said Gray had texted numerous people to help him sort out an alleged drug debt before getting his partner involved.<\/p>\n
On the day, Knight was expecting Gray to pick her up to get supplies for her hospital stay.<\/p>\n
However, he had instead decided to go and sort out a drug debt at a nearby property, he said.<\/p>\n
Given the drawn-out prosecution, Judge Clark said she still wasn\u2019t clear if Knight accepted her involvement.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a woman who was still healing from childbirth,\u201d the judge said.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe had a child in NICU [Newborn and Intensive Care Unit].<\/p>\n
\u201cIs she still maintaining that she didn\u2019t do anything?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n
Taylor said his client accepted her role, but he emphasised that it was Gray who was the organiser.<\/p>\n
Brooke Knight was picked up by her partner from Waikato Hospital to go and carry out the drug-debt aggravated robbery. Photo \/ Alan Gibson<\/p>\n
The judge said she was trying to figure out whether there was a distinction between the pair.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I can make a distinction … then that would make a difference to the overall situation that she is in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Taylor said her client was on medication at the time and that \u201cshe was really caught up in the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCaught up willingly or unwillingly,\u201d the judge asked.<\/p>\n
Taylor said the differentiation was her role in the actual offending.<\/p>\n
\u201cHer partner premeditated this, and Ms Knight was picked up from hospital in a vulnerable position and became involved in someone else\u2019s planned offending.\u201d<\/p>\n
Taylor said Knight\u2019s partner had sent texts to a variety of other people before getting her involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was really finding any way for a strength in a numbers plan.<\/p>\n
\u201cMs Knight was not involved in any of those texts whatsoever.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018They\u2019ve been pointing the finger at each other\u2019<\/p>\n
Crown prosecutor Matthew Temm said there were \u201csome concerning elements\u201d of the case which involved a particularly vulnerable victim.<\/p>\n
He said both defendants had come to their respective sentencings, \u201cpointing the finger at each other\u201d.<\/p>\n
Judge Clark said it had been hard to get a true feel for what happened and how Knight ended up in the position that she did.<\/p>\n
Temm said Knight had contributed to the delay in sentencing as she had not engaged with probation. <\/p>\n
Knight now found herself in custody, due to breaches and non-compliance on bail, had lost her transitional housing, while her mother, who is undergoing cancer treatment, looked after her other children.<\/p>\n
\u201cThings have gone from bad to worse for her,\u201d the judge added.<\/p>\n
The judge said the more she learned about Knight, the more she found \u201cshe does tend to disengage\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not sure if that is akin to putting her head in the sand or not.\u201d<\/p>\n
She took a starting point of four years\u2019 jail, before allowing discounts for her guilty plea, childhood, prospect of rehabilitation, and remorse.<\/p>\n
Judge Clark jailed Knight for 22 months, but granted her leave to apply for home detention.<\/p>\n
Belinda Feek is an Open Justice reporter based in Waikato. She has worked at NZME for 11 years and has been a journalist for 22.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018Give us your money\u2019 The two victims were known to Knight and Gray through mutual friends. About 11am…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":371289,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[20861,5838,1364,2241,78,13635,101,2721,111,54769,43,139,69,5502,27517,61,1524,102],"class_list":{"0":"post-371288","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-brooke","9":"tag-help","10":"tag-her","11":"tag-hospital","12":"tag-in","13":"tag-knight","14":"tag-left","15":"tag-mum","16":"tag-new-zealand","17":"tag-newborn","18":"tag-news","19":"tag-newzealand","20":"tag-nz","21":"tag-partner","22":"tag-robbery","23":"tag-to","24":"tag-waikato","25":"tag-with"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/371289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}