Gang violence alleged

Press, 20 February 1979, Page 4

Gang violence alleged

“Gillian just happened to look out the window . . .

‘Oh, my God, they’re back again,’ she said. That’s when the windows started exploding around us,” Christopher Francis Tui, aged 21, a clerk, told Mr B. A. Palmer, S.M., in the Magistrate’s Court yesterday. Mr Tui was giving evidence about an attack on an Aranui house in the early hours of September 23. Nine teen-age defendants, five of whom come under the jurisdiction of the Children and Young Persons Court, are facing charges of being part of an unlawful assembly at Yarmouth Street on September 23, conducting themselves so that there was cause for persons in the neighbourhood to fear that violence could be used against them. A further three charges of assault, two of wilful damage and five of intimidation have also been denied. The defendants who are under the jurisdiction of the Magistrate’s Court are Clifford William Breitmeyer, aged 18, a knife hand, Andrew James Beadles, aged 17, Jeffery Ronald Herbert, aged 18, and Colin Peter McCluskey, aged 17, unemployed. They pleaded not guilty. Christopher Tui and his younger brother, John, were among the prosecution witnesses heard yesterday. Christopher Tui with two teen-age girls tvho were in the Yarmouth Street house when the two attacks were made on it, gave evidence. Gillian Margaret Ellis, aged 18, and Deborah Catherine Elstob, aged 17, said that the attacks with a short interval between, came after a fight outside the house in which several youths were injured and some taken to hospital. The police had been called to the fight and after they had gone those remaining inside the house had sat down for a cun of tea when, according to Miss Ellis, “10 or 15 guys” appeared outside on the lawn,

a few of them armed with sticks. It was then that the windows in the lounge where the group was sitting began to break, and the occupants of the room ran into the hall of the house, rang the police again, and then huddled in the hall until the smashing stopped.

The Tui brothers denied that there had been any provocation from the youths inside the house before the earlier fight developed. However, conflicting evidence on this point was given by Barry Graham Radcliff, aged 16, a student, who said that the occupants of the house had come out with about 10 bottles which they attempted to smash against lamposts. “But they wouldn’t smash so they threw them at us,” he said.

Exhibits of missiles found at the Yarmouth Street address, some of them inside the house, included bricks, stones, a wooden stake and a carving knife. The Magistrate said he would rule this afternoon on counsels’ submissions that some charges should be dismissed for lack of evidence. Defence witnesses will be heard this afternoon. .