Coroner Rachael Schmidt-McCleave said Ruatoto had been living in Northland at the time with his partner and three children.<\/p>\n
He had recently moved back to live with his mother.<\/p>\n
Ruatoto and two others had visited a property to smoke cannabis on the afternoon of July 9 before leaving.<\/p>\n
The trio went and visited friends, travelling to an address on Te Tii Rd between 2.30am and 3am the next morning.<\/p>\n
Coroner Schmidt-McCleave said police were unable to determine why the three men went to the Te Tii property, but suspected it was related to buying drugs, a debt owed or a planned confrontation with another man living at the address.<\/p>\n
Shortly after they arrived, there was a fight between Ruatoto and a man at the property, Ash Rankin, the coroner said.<\/p>\n
Ruatoto was tackled by Rankin, sending him falling into a glass sliding door.<\/p>\n
He was injured, and driven to hospital by the two men he had spent the previous afternoon with.<\/p>\n
\u201cMedical staff immediately attended to Mr Ruatoto as he did not have a pulse,\u201d Schmidt-McCleave said.<\/p>\n
\u201cCPR was commenced and Mr Ruatoto was subsequently resuscitated, and air lifted to Auckland Hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n
Staff at Auckland Hospital performed CPR once again, but Ruatoto had suffered cardiac arrest and could not be revived.<\/p>\n
He was pronounced dead just before 10am.<\/p>\n
An autopsy found the cause of his death was penetrating, sharp force injuries to the medial left arm near his elbow.<\/p>\n
Methamphetamine and cannabis were also found in his blood.<\/p>\n
Forensic pathologist Dr Charley Glenn concluded Ruatoto\u2019s injuries were \u201cvery consistent with an accidental fall into a glass door\u201d.<\/p>\n
Police investigated Ruatoto\u2019s death, determining Rankin was not criminally liable for what happened.<\/p>\n
They said Rankin had acted in self-defence.<\/p>\n
\u201cPolice found there was no evidence to suggest Mr Rankin intentionally acted to cause harm to Mr Ruatoto, or that the incident was premeditated,\u201d the coroner said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am satisfied that the evidence before me establishes that Mr Ruatoto was involved in an altercation with Mr Rankin, which resulted in Mr Ruatoto accidentally falling through a glass sliding door and sustaining a fatal injury to his arm.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Coroner Rachael Schmidt-McCleave said Ruatoto had been living in Northland at the time with his partner and three…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413221,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5813,74,27129,12629,38268,154877,78,3375,5158,111,43,139,69,4056,6122,58932,6736],"class_list":["post-413220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-acting","tag-after","tag-blackwell","tag-coroner","tag-finn","tag-fracas","tag-in","tag-killed","tag-man","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-person","tag-rules","tag-selfdefence","tag-was"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413220","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=413220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}