Face of the Day

A woman with ties to the Nomads and Crips has been jailed after admitting she helped facilitate what a judge has described as “one of the worst cases of kidnappings seen in Auckland in recent years”.

After being taken from the bedroom of her Birkenhead home by a group of armed, masked intruders in the middle of the night in June 2023, victim Kayla Pawa was driven to the Glen Eden home of defendant Bernadette Rawiri.

Over the 24 days of hell that followed, Pawa was:

– beaten repeatedly, including with baseball bats
– burned with a blowtorch, with her captors threatening at one point to burn out her eyeballs
– told to pick which finger she wanted to be cut off
– had her hands smashed with a hammer
– starved for five days and left in a cold bathroom without clothes or a blanket, relying only on shampoo bottles she filled with hot water for warmth
– had a gun held to her face
– ordered while at a secluded Northland property to dig what she was told would be her grave, and
– left bound and gagged in the boot of a car.

The purpose of the torture, Judge Brooke Gibson said last week as he ordered Rawiri to serve a sentence of six years and two months imprisonment, was to break the victim’s will so she would give up the password to her then-partner’s cryptocurrency stash.

Pawa repeatedly insisted she didn’t know the password and had no way of obtaining the money but those involved in her abduction, including Rawiri, didn’t believe her.

“It’s clear you were involved right from the start,” the judge told Rawiri, who stood in the Auckland District Court dock wearing all black, with her head lowered and her hands in her pocket. “You were clearly present when she was interrogated in your home...

“You may well hang your head in shame, because it is a very shameful event.”