For the second time in a week a courtroom echoed with the mournful sobs of a man who’d just discovered his best friend dying in a gutter.

A jury wanted to hear the chilling 111 call again as Daeus Taueki discovered his mate Raynor Cribb had been dragged 84 metres underneath a car where he lay struggling to breathe, dying just minutes after emergency services arrived.

Today, that jury found Adam Henare, 42, guilty of reckless driving causing death after deliberately dragging Cribb, 27, who was stuck underneath his Subaru in the early hours of one February morning last year. Henare was on the run from police at the time after ditching his electronically monitored ankle bracelet.

How the 27-year-old came to be stuck under Henare’s car was never in contention during the week-long trial. It followed an altercation between Cribb, his two friends and Henare and his friend Alicia Ralston at a quiet reserve on the outskirts of Levin.

Cribb was in the passenger seat of his friend Daeus Taueki’s Honda along with their friend Angus Nuku-Rauhihi. Henare and Ralston were in Henare’s blue Subaru when the three boys said they’d seen Henare rummage through their car and decided to give chase.

The vehicles reached speeds of 160km/h on back roads before coming to an abrupt stop when they both attempted to take a sharp right-hand bend onto Cambridge St just outside Levin.

The Honda swerved to avoid the quick-braking Subaru and, at some point during the manoeuvre, Cribb took off his seatbelt, opened his door and fell out of the car and was run over by the Subaru.

Henare then drove a further 80 metres with Cribb stuck underneath his vehicle with a jury now deciding he knew he was there and chose to drive away anyway.

The trial, which spanned all of last week at the High Court in Palmerston North, focused on what Henare’s lawyer, Phil Mitchell, summed up as Stop One and Stop Two.

Stop One refers to the initial near-miss between the two cars at the corner of Cambridge St where Cribb has fallen from the Honda.

Stop Two refers to some 80m up the road where he was dragged to and ultimately died.

A rough indication of stop's one and two where the cars have come to a stop. Stop two is where Raynor Cribb was dragged to. Photo / Google Earth

Henare’s case hinged on the assertion that he got out of his car at Stop One ready to fight the three young men who’d chased him, before they drove off back up the road and he got back into his car to find it driving strangely and he thought he’d buckled a front left wheel.

When he got out of the car further up the road at Stop Two he discovered not a buckled wheel but Cribb stuck underneath the car just behind the front passenger wheel. It’s then he says the boys confronted him after having driven back up the road to try and find their friend.

Henare says the boys in the car left to go and find a car jack and while they were gone he slowly manoeuvred his car off Cribb, who was seriously injured, with the help of his passenger, before leaving him in a gutter on the side of the road.

However, the boys say this whole interaction occurred at Stop One where all the occupants of both cars came to the horrifying revelation that Cribb was stuck under Henare’s car. They say they left from the corner to find a jack and came back some 10 minutes later to find the car gone and Cribb barely breathing up the road.

In his closing submissions on Monday Mitchell said that it was understandable for Cribb’s friends to give unreliable evidence given their state of intoxication, panic and shock at seeing their friend nearly dead and stuck underneath a car.

“A part of the human condition is to mistakenly remember where you’ve put something,” Mitchell said before noting how easy it was to forget where you’ve put your car keys, or parked your car.

“You can ‘know’ something, and be completely mistaken,” he said.

“When you add in heavy intoxication and being incredibly emotional…the chance of confusion increases.”

He went on to attack Taueki’s reliability and said that he gave three different statements to police, including one where he denied his friend Angus Nuku-Rauhihi was present during the incident when he was.

“His lies are littered like confetti at a wedding,” he said.

Raynor Cribb died roughly 80m from where the cars narrowly avoided colliding. This is what's being referred to in the trial as "Stop Two". Photo / Jeremy Wilkinson

Mitchell said a key component of the reckless driving charge was causation which meant the Crown needed to prove that it was being dragged 84 metres that killed Cribb.

Mitchell said that the fatal injuries were sustained by Cribb after falling for his own car and being unintentionally run over by Henare - not by being dragged down the road stuck under a Subaru that was 13.5cm off the ground.

“The critical internal injuries that lead to his death occurred in that initial leap and being run over at the corner,” he said.

Crown prosecutor Guy Carter said in his closings submissions the whole trial boiled down to only a few minutes.

Carter said in those minutes Henare found the young man underneath his car and chose to drive away anyway.

“He wanted to leave the scene. Not because he’s afraid of Daeus Taueki and Angus Rauhihi…but because he didn’t want to get caught by police it was because he was on the run,” he told the jury.

Carter asked the jury to imagine how they would react following a car accident and suggested that any normal person would get out and check what the damage was.

“He’s tried to make you doubt your common sense. He’s tried to say he drove 84 metres up the road without ever checking it for damage after the accident,” Carter said.

“Get real members of the jury, that’s not what happened.

“That story makes no sense. That’s not how people behave.”

Carter said that CCTV footage from the nearby Mainfreight building proved that Cribb’s friends had driven away from the corner looking for him after he’d fallen from the car, before coming back to the corner.

“Every single witness identifies both vehicles being parked together at the corner,” he said.

“CCTV can’t lie ladies and gentlemen, and what it does is catch the defendant in his one.”

The corner of Cambridge St in Levin where the cars nearly collided. Photo / Jeremy Wilkinson.

However, it was a chilling phone call to 111 by Taueki when he returned to the corner to find his mate gone, and then finding him 84 metres up the road covered in blood and struggling to breathe that Carter said was imperative to the trial.

“You’ve met Daeus Taueki, he’s not an Oscar winning actor. You could not make up the shock in his voice,” Carter said.

Carter said Taueki had no reason to lie because it didn’t benefit him and he would have had to come up with it on the spot while he was watching his best friend die in a gutter.

It was this CCTV footage and the 111 call that the jury requested to view again just before 4pm on Monday afternoon where the call was played again in open court.

That jury of six men and six women used their own watches to time how long the 111 call lasted before delivering their verdict at 12.15pm on Tuesday afternoon.

Henare will be sentenced in December.

Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.