{"id":426936,"date":"2026-05-14T07:37:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T07:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/426936\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T07:37:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T07:37:08","slug":"pauline-timu-sentenced-for-manslaughter-over-the-death-of-8-year-old-rickahshae-keefe-haerewa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/426936\/","title":{"rendered":"Pauline Timu sentenced for manslaughter over the death of 8-year-old Rickah\u2019Shae Keefe-Haerewa"},"content":{"rendered":"

But rather than race to Whakat\u0101ne<\/a> Hospital, she pulled over for between seven and nine minutes, and rang another occupant of her house to warn that police might be coming to their address.<\/p>\n

When she arrived at the hospital with Rickah\u2019Shae, medical staff found him in the backseat, unresponsive.<\/p>\n

Attempts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful, and he was pronounced dead.<\/p>\n

His cause of death was determined as blunt force trauma to the abdomen, but he was found to have other injuries, including signs of historic injuries consistent with non-accidental assault.<\/p>\n

According to an agreed summary of facts, on the day Rickah\u2019Shae died, Timu had slapped him in the mouth as a \u201cpunishment for lying\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Rickah'ShaeRickah’Shae Keefe-Haerewa, also known as Joppy, died in 2024.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s alleged that, later that day, he suffered a serious assault by another person.<\/p>\n

Timu failed to intervene.<\/p>\n

When she was in her car with him later, and it was apparent he needed medical care, she still failed to seek it, pulling over to make phone calls.<\/p>\n

None of them were to emergency services.<\/p>\n

Timu pleaded guilty to manslaughter<\/a>, admitting to causing Rickah\u2019Shae\u2019s death by an omission \u2013 namely failing without lawful excuse to provide him, being a child in her care, with necessaries and take reasonable steps to protect him from injury.<\/p>\n

She also pleaded guilty to other charges, some of them representative, that related to ill-treatment and ongoing violence towards Rickah\u2019Shae.<\/p>\n

She accepted slapping him or \u201cbooting his bum\u201d, hitting him with a pole or stick as discipline, whipping him with a cord, and sometimes filming the assaults to embarrass him.<\/p>\n

In the three years she had legal custody of him, he was regularly observed with black eyes.<\/p>\n

She would shave off his hair as a punishment, keep him home from school for \u201cweeks at a time\u201d without justification, and send him to school without food.<\/p>\n

Then she would tell the school not to provide him with the free school lunches.<\/p>\n

She earlier also pleaded guilty to violence charges related to other children, some of whom were in her full-time care, with the offending dating back to 2013.<\/p>\n

They included charges of assault, assault with a weapon, and ill-treatment of children.<\/p>\n

The summaries of facts detailed assaults against several children, including punches to the arms and stomach, and hits to the face, that were hard enough to leave bruises.<\/p>\n

She hit one child with a belt and a wooden spoon.<\/p>\n

On one occasion, she punched a young teen in her care in the mouth, causing the teen\u2019s lip to bleed. The punch forced the teen\u2019s head back, and it hit a door.<\/p>\n

The summary said that when she hit one of the boys in her care, it was so hard that it hurt her own shoulder.<\/p>\n

Ill-treatment charges Timu admitted included shaving the children\u2019s hair to embarrass them, and withholding food.<\/p>\n

Now, she has been sentenced to 11 years and seven months\u2019 imprisonment; however, for legal reasons, further details about how the sentence was reached, the judge\u2019s comments, and other details cannot be reported at this stage.<\/p>\n

Justice James MacGillivray adopted a starting point of 14 years and six months.<\/p>\n

This was comprised of seven years and six months for the offending against Rickah\u2019shae, and an uplift of a further seven years for the offending against the other children, all of whom have name suppression.<\/p>\n

The judge gave Timu a 15% discount for her guilty plea, and a 5% discount for background factors.<\/p>\n

The judge imposed a minimum period of imprisonment of 50%, meaning that Timu will need to serve at least half of the 11 years and seven months before she is eligible for parole.<\/p>\n

Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But rather than race to Whakat\u0101ne Hospital, she pulled over for between seven and nine minutes, and rang…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":426937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[15122,2511,868,634,8912,2082,42,218968,15035,43,1118,1523,85453,165639,5161,427,223,1961,165638,40,38,41,39,1455,102],"class_list":["post-426936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-8yearold","tag-child","tag-deals","tag-death","tag-distressing","tag-for","tag-headlines","tag-keefehaerewa","tag-manslaughter","tag-news","tag-of","tag-over","tag-pauline","tag-rickahshae","tag-sentenced","tag-story","tag-the","tag-this","tag-timu","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-warning","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426936","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=426936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/426937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}