Steve Braunias: The driveway drug deal and killing of Robbie Hart

The best of Auckland is west, with its setting sun, its black sand beaches and insane surf. West Auckland is so great. It’s a zone of work and sport, parties and rent. It’s got a
strong sense of pride and decency. It’s there down in the valleys of Glen Eden, on either side of the railway track. It’s there up in the heights of Massey, with old bombs on the front lawn.

“It’s f***ing shit,” said Bonnie Fahy.

We met at the High Court of Auckland during last month’s trial of three people – the shooter, the getaway driver, the getaway driver’s girlfriend – accused of murdering Robbie Hart, Fahy’s ex-partner, and father of her eldest son. The three co-accused were each found not guilty of murder and each found guilty of manslaughter. They were due to be sentenced on Friday morning. Fahy was there to see it, driving to Auckland from her home, her safer ground, in New Plymouth.

“My voice isn’t up to it,” said Justice Paul Davidson.

He was having trouble breathing on Friday morning and read out his sentencing in the pained swampy growl of some ancient bluesman. Justice Davidson’s laryngitis attack was so severe he could go no further, and adjourned it to Monday morning. Some grieving family members living outside of Auckland were unable to attend Monday’s day of reckoning. The shooter, Dylan Harris, got seven years and 11 months’ imprisonment. The driver and ideas man, Adam North, got seven years and seven months, and his girlfriend and accomplice, Jasmine Murray, got four years and six months. She had only just turned 20 when Robbie Hart was shot and killed.

“I met Robbie when I was about 16,” said Fahy. “I’m 40 next year. So 20-something years we were best mates, just hanging out in West Auckland. We were like the goths and the metallers. You know, the black clothes. Metallica, Pantera. There was like a little family of us really, in Glen Eden, New Lynn, Henderson.”

He was shot in the head, the bullet going through his motorcycle helmet at point-blank range in a driveway on Great North Road, in New Lynn, West Auckland. It was over a drug deal, an exchange of the substance that runs through the veins of West Auckland, that flows like the creeks and streams carving their way through the low, damp ground of West Auckland: methamphetamine.

“It was a whodunit on day one,” said Detective Senior Sergeant Tim Williams.

He was interviewed at the police station in Henderson. It’s a cop shop built in the 1980s, with gorgeous native timber panelling, and an upstairs staff café looking over a cherry tree. Williams gave a chatty and jovial guided tour of the premises; as soon as he sat down for an interview alongside a watchful police media liaison officer, he spoke only in the formal, guarded tones of a policeman trained to say the least things possible in a courtroom.

“Obviously we have Mr Hart lying deceased in a driveway, and we have no idea how or why this happened,” he said.

The shooting was on Friday morning, November 5, 2021. Hart was killed instantly. He fell on top of his Yamaha motorcycle. He was 39 years old.

“He was a very kind, caring – he was always the nicest guy,” Fahy said. “Very handsome – all the girls loved him. He used to be a security guard at Farmers in New Lynn when we first got together. Then he worked for Auckland Towing. And he played league for Glenorra and he was such a talent on the guitar, just unbelievably good. He could listen to a song and just pick up a guitar and play it.”

His family attended the trial, including his mum, born in Rarotonga. Fahy came with her mum, and her son with Robbie, a very tall teenage boy with dark soulful eyes.

“He looks so much like Robbie it’s crazy,” she said. “Robbie was an awesome dad when he was clean. Yeah. The best dad. And we had the best relationship ever. We were together for about six years and then we got sucked into the world of drugs. and then we lost everything.

“We lost our children, lost our home, he lost his job, we broke up with each other and through all those years, we both struggled on and off drugs. He got clean for a while. He was doing really good. He had our son, and he had a job and was going to do boxing, and had his head screwed on, and then – then he just started dabbling in it again, and it really took a hold of him. The last six years of his life – wow. It really ate him up.”

The trial featured two meth addicts who gave evidence, one so incoherently and manically that when he left the stand, he had to be calmed down by police. The other witness talked about staying up with Dylan Harris for five days straight smoking meth before the killing. They lived in his car that whole time.

“We identified Mr Harris through a fingerprint,” said Detective Senior Sergeant Williams. “The initial sergeant who turned up at the scene, Sergeant Julian Conder, worked out very quickly there was a CCTV camera, and he very quickly examined that, and identified a Suzuki Swift. It showed Mr Harris getting out of the vehicle on the passenger side, and Julian noticed when he exits the vehicle, he touched a specific place on the car, just above the passenger’s door, almost on the roof, on the frame of the door. We located the car, and Julian said, ‘You need to look for a print right there’, and sure enough Mr Harris’s fingerprints were exactly where he said.”

The investigation worked out it was a drug deal gone wrong. At the trial, however, Crown prosecutors went further, and presented it as an “execution”, a deliberate hit, a kind of assassination. The theory didn’t make a lick of sense. It mystified everyone in court, not least the three defendants, who were only ever greedy little strung-out drug pigs wanting to bury their snouts in burning meth.

“Two members of the public who were out for a walk observed the suspicious behaviour of two occupants in the Suzuki Swift,” said Williams. “Police then located the vehicle on Taunton Terrace in Blockhouse Bay. That was less than an hour after the homicide. Specialist search teams were deployed into the area, and found items on the side of the road which were forensically linked to the occupants.”

The occupants were Adam North and his girlfriend Jasmine Murray.

“Our police officers in Waitematā have a good knowledge of people in our area, and were able to identify both of them.”

They were arrested five days after the killing, at an address in Glen Eden; Harris was arrested five days after that, at an address in Rotorua.

“It would appear Mr Harris left Auckland despite the Covid lockdown at the time, and he was located with an Armed Offenders Squad search warrant.”

How did he get past the lockdown roadblocks?

“We believe he left Auckland in the boot of the vehicle.”

Harris provided the only surprise in the trial, and likely its most crucial moment, when he elected to give evidence. It was against the advice of his counsel, ubiquitous criminal defence lawyer Ron Mansfield. It opened him up for cross-examination. Harris went ahead anyway. He wanted to say he was sorry. He impressed as an articulate man, someone with dignity, who felt genuine remorse. He cried talking about the shooting; members of the jury wept, too.

“Whatever the light is inside him, it’s pretty bright and that’s what I saw straight away,” his ex-partner Justine Hamill said in an interview with Woman’s Day in December 2019. “There was something about him. He had a depth of knowing inside, something intrinsic, and I could see he was really willing to change his life.”

Bizarre that an ex-con, who went on to shoot a man dead in a driveway in New Lynn, would feature in a soaring story of love and redemption in a woman’s magazine. Bizarre, too, how he met Hamill: he was serving time at Rimutaka Prison when she came in to teach yoga to the prisoners. They fell in love. He moved in with her in Palmerston North after his release. He found work with a home maintenance company. He got on well with her teenage daughter and two twin sons. At 33, he had been institutionalised for a third of his life, but things were turning around. Things fell apart and he drifted back to West Auckland.

“I have a bit of forgiveness towards him,” said Fahy. “It might sound a bit weird but our family were hanging out with his family, his sister, during the trial. He reached out and asked his sister to tell us, ‘Look they probably don’t what to hear this but I’m really truly sorry for what happened.’ He was the only one who showed remorse.”

The Crown case was that Adam North and Jasmine Murray stole a phone from a woman who knew Robbie Hart. Murray impersonated the woman, messaging Hart with a treacherous endearment: “hun”. He was instructed to bring 14 grams of methamphetamine to New Lynn in exchange for $3000. They got hold of Harris. His role was to wave a gun at Hart at their rendezvous, and take the drugs. Hart duly waited for his friend, a pretty woman whose Facebook name was Sativa AK, and got ambushed by a stranger holding a gun. Harris advanced towards him in the driveway of a very popular tinnie house. He was on foot. He ran right at Hart. Hart stepped back. The gun went off. An accident, Harris said; deliberate, the Crown said.

“I would like to think it was an accident,” said Fahy. “Makes it feel a bit better. I don’t think he intended to kill Robbie that day. I think maybe either he lost it and went, ‘Boom, f*ck you’, or the gun did go off like he said it went off. It’s one of those ones.”

At Monday’s sentencing, Justice Davidson delivered a potted biography of Adam North. It was a biography from Hell. His mother was an alcoholic. His father committed suicide, after introducing his son to methamphetamine at 14. He appeared at the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the sexual abuse of children in state care. As for Murray, the court was told how she was sexually groomed by a much older man when she was 15. Like Harris, like North, like Hart, she was a methamphetamine addict.

“We feel if it wasn’t for Adam and Jasmine, Robbie would still be alive today,” Fahy said. “They were the ones that planned all this. They set it all up. They were the main ones that we wanted to see get sentenced.”

Throughout the trial, it was assumed Hart acted as the dealer wanting to sell 14 grams of meth. But he only had 0.7 grams on his body. It’s likely that he was only the go-between. It’s possible, though, that Harris somehow had the presence of mind to take the 14 grams when he shot him, and run off with it; he was cross-examined about being seen by witnesses to drop something after he ran away, and bent down to pick it up.

“I guess there are a number of scenarios which could have occurred,” said Detective Tim Williams. “It’s not uncommon for people in the drug scene to get the money and then go away and get the items. Likewise it’s possible the drugs were taken from Mr Hart. We’ll never know.”

What to make of Harris bending to pick up something that he’d dropped?

“He said that was his cigarettes. Unfortunately the CCTV quality isn’t good enough to show you what it is.”

Could be meth?

“Could be anything.”

Such as meth?

“Could be.”

But to suppose Hart had it on him in the first place is to imagine him as enough of a player in the drug scene to have that much for sale.

“That’s a joke,” Fahy said, and laughed. “Yeah. He was no big-time drug dealer. He had enough to feed his habit and maybe sell a little bit to get more for his own habit. When he got the message he’d have been like, ‘Yep come meet me’, and he would of gone to someone to get it. There’s no way he would have that amount on him. No one would give him that much.”

She said: “He was harmless. So harmless.” She said: “He was a lost soul.” She said: “He was unhappy.”

Meth had done him in. “He could have still been that awesome guy we all once knew. He could have been there for his kids.”

Meth got him killed. “I’m devastated that such a good guy had to go out like that.”

Meth was the white ruin of West Auckland, emptying it, draining it, creating a zombie army, more dead than alive, barely able to cast a shadow.

“Like I had to move away from Auckland to get away from it. I’ve been clean for three years now in New Plymouth. When I go back to West Auckland and I see people it’s like ‘Oh my god.’ Like with Robbie, when I’d go up and see him, it was so sad to see how much it had consumed him. He was a shell of the person I once knew, like a totally different person. You could see he was still in there but the drugs had changed his appearance, his morals, just everything. It destroyed him,” Fahy said.

“He used to message me a lot saying, ‘I want to get out of Auckland, I’m over this life, can I come down there?’ And I said, ‘My door is always open to you, Robbie.’ And this was two months before he was killed. I said to him, ‘Robbie, you want to sort your life out and choose better people to hang out before something bad happens to you.’ Something bad happened to him two months later.

“There’s a small handful of us that made it out of that life. But there’s a whole lot more who haven’t. Robbie’s the second person I know that’s been [killed] Another friend of mine was shot in the head in Glen Eden like two months after Robbie.

“I used to be proud to call West Auckland my home. But I wouldn’t call it my home anymore because it’s not the place it used to be. When I go up there, and drive around, you see just so many people on it. Everyone’s on it. You can pick them out pretty easily.”

Robbie Hart’s funeral was held during lockdown. Only 10 people were allowed to attend. Nice guy, a sweetheart, loving dad, loved by his family, hard worker, good at league and even better at guitar, “harmless”, “lost”, struggling but hopeful, he was brought out by funeral directors in a sealed steel coffin. They played Metallica’s Fade to Black. He was buried at Waikumete Cemetery in Glen Eden, beneath the long dark line of the Waitākere Ranges, the border of West Auckland.