• Zacharius Rakena faced up to seven years’ imprisonment after dangerous confrontations with a theft victim and police.
• Having served lengthy prison terms previously without much effect, his lawyer suggested a new approach.
• Judge Yelena Yelavich commended Rakena’s rehabilitation efforts through the Grace Foundation.

February 19 last year was not Zacharius Rakena’s best day as a criminal.

The Māngere resident, who has seen the inside of a jail on multiple occasions, was caught in the act early that morning as he slid into the driver’s seat of a car that wasn’t his own.

What followed was a wild, sloppy game of cat-and-mouse during which he risked the life of the car owner, who jumped on the bonnet. Rakena got away but left his own van – along with his fingerprints – at the scene.

He still had the stolen car hours later when police pulled up to the parked vehicle and tried to box it in. But Rakena wasn’t yet ready to give in.

He repeatedly rammed the police car until the stolen vehicle was inoperable, then tried to run – tussling with police and injuring one with an officer’s own stun gun in the process.

He pulled off a narrow escape but it ended the next morning when police arrived at his partner’s house, sending in a police dog to take him by force when Rakena hid in a neighbour’s laundry room and refused to come out.

Zacharius Manuera Totorewa Rakena appears in the Manukau District Court for sentencing after pleading guilty to attacking police and driving dangerously as a car theft victim clung to the vehicle's bonnet. Photo / Craig Kapitan

“The consequences could have been much more serious,” Manukau District Court Judge Yelena Yelavich said last week as she considered the defendant’s request for a non-custodial sentence after pleading guilty to nine charges.

“Thankfully, they were not, but they were serious enough.”

The judge approved the request.

Break the cycle

Rakena was joined in court last week by supporters from the Grace Foundation, a live-in rehabilitation programme known for taking in some of Auckland’s most hardened criminals.

Reports of his rehabilitation at the bail house have been positive, defence lawyer Vernon Tava pointed out, noting also that his client “served a reasonably lengthy period of imprisonment” starting in 2021.

“It would be certainly in the interest of justice ... to have the defendant continue on that rehabilitative pathway to break the cycle of offending,” he argued.

“Another term of imprisonment may well just set him back to the old ways.”

He suggested the punitive element of the sentence could already be considered by the judge to have been served by the 287 days his client spent in jail awaiting trial, followed by months on restrictive, electronically monitored bail. With that out of the way, he suggested, a sentence of intensive supervision would be best for his client and for the long-term safety of the community.

Crown prosecutor Nina Wilgur, meanwhile, emphasised that the case involved “serious offending against the backdrop of a very poor criminal history”.

Dangerous cat-and-mouse

The most recent trouble for the defendant, whose full name is Zacharius Manuera Totorewa Rakena, started around 6.30am on February 19 last year.

That morning the victim was commuting to work near Auckland Airport in his blue Subaru Impreza when he overtook Rakena’s van on Landing Drive.

The defendant followed the commuter into the carpark of a lunch bar on Montgomerie Rd. They both parked, but Rakena hung back as the other man went inside. He then tried to get in the other man’s car.

However, he was caught in the act. The victim ran outside and stood in front of the vehicle, blocking the exit.

“The defendant accelerated and veered right, trying to move around [the owner] but [he] moved with the vehicle, trying to prevent the defendant from leaving,” court documents state.

“The defendant accelerated forward. As he did so, [the victim] threw himself on to the bonnet of the car. He held on to the top of the bonnet with his left hand and the passenger wheel with his right hand.”

With the victim still clinging to the bonnet, Rakena continued driving to the exit of the carpark.

“There, he braked hard in an attempt to throw [him] from the bonnet,” documents state. “This caused the lower part of [the victim’s] body to fall from the bonnet, but he was still holding on with his arms.”

Rakena then reversed the car “at speed”, dragging the victim alongside the car. The victim let go after scraping his knees along the ground for about 2m. He was unable to work for about a month afterwards.

Cul-de-sac standoff

The agreed summaries of facts for Rakena’s case list three other victims – all police officers whose names have been redacted.

The officers caught up to the defendant at 2.30pm that same day, finding him standing next to the open driver’s door of the stolen vehicle in a Māngere cul-de-sac. A sergeant, with two constables as his passengers, parked the patrol vehicle nose-to-nose with the stolen car to prevent him from leaving.

Zacharius Rakena attacked three police officers when they confronted him over a stolen vehicle at the Ruaiti Rd cul-de-sac in Māngere in February 2024. Photo / Google

Rakena got back inside the stolen vehicle and tried to force his way out of the police block, ramming the police car with enough force that one of the officers recalled smoke coming from the stolen vehicle’s tyres.

One officer got out of the vehicle, getting ready to use his Taser, when Rakena rammed the patrol car again, pushing it about 5m.

“The defendant reversed again and accelerated forward, colliding with the police car a third time,” documents state. “This time, the defendant’s vehicle collided with a bollard, causing it to become stuck.”

He ran.

Rakena fell to the ground after one of the constables shot him with his Taser, but the defendant was able to break the wires. The constable threw the Taser to the side because it no longer had any active prongs, while the sergeant moved in and attempted to restrain Rakena on the ground, according to the agreed facts.

During this time, the other constable deployed his Taser, but it hit both the defendant and the sergeant, causing the sergeant to lose his grip.

Rakena then scrambled for the discarded Taser.

“F*** off!” he said as he pointed it at the officers, who withdrew from the situation to await back-up.

He ran away through Ruaiti Reserve, taking the Taser with him.

One of the constables later reported he was “contact stunned” to one of his fingers during the melee but did not require treatment.

Police took no chances the next day when they arrived at an Ōtara home belonging to Rakena’s girlfriend. Upon seeing police, Rakena had hopped a fence and tried to hide in a neighbour’s laundry. When the ruse didn’t work, he barricaded the laundry door with his body and claimed to have weapons, stating he would self-harm.

“Eventually, they were able to distract him and open the door,” court documents state.

As he was pulled away, with the help of a police dog, he was writhing and thrashing – resulting in an additional charge of resisting arrest.

In a recorded interview with police later that day, Rakena claimed it was police who had rammed him the day earlier, not the other way around. He said he blacked out when an officer tasered him and he did not recall tasering the constable.

With his guilty pleas late last year, Rakena acknowledged having committed the crimes. At sentencing, his lawyer downplayed the significance of the resisting arrest charge.

“The thrashing ... was quite a natural response to having a dog set on him in a confined space,” Tova suggested.

‘Significant history’

In assessing what the sentence should be, Judge Yelavich pointed to Rakena’s “significant history” of crime, which included 12 offences involving assault or violence, eight offences involving resisting or assaulting police and other instances involving stolen vehicles.

There was also an armed robbery from over a decade ago, not elaborated on at the sentencing hearing, that Rakena’s previous lawyers tried unsuccessfully to get overturned in the Supreme Court.

He had been found guilty by a District Court jury in June 2015 of targeting an Onehunga auto parts business a year earlier and was subsequently sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. The case against him had been circumstantial, with the Crown noting that a pair of striped track pants matching those of the masked, pistol-wielding robber were found in a recycling bin outside Rakena’s home. The clothing contained his DNA.

His lawyers argued that a miscarriage of justice had occurred due to an unreasonable verdict. The Court of Appeal disagreed in a July 2016 judgment.

“Nothing raised shows any risk of a miscarriage of justice,” the Supreme Court added three months later.

Capacity to change

Of all the charges Rakena faced last week, it was the car thefts that carried the largest possible penalty – a maximum of seven years’ imprisonment. In addition to the Subaru Impreza, he admitted to having stolen two other cars: a Ford Ranger taken from a Māngere Bridge residential construction site in December 2023 and a Mitsubishi Lancer taken from another victim’s Māngere workplace in early January 2024.

He later claimed he had gone to the construction site for a job interview and wasn’t the thief and on the second occasion was only a passenger, not knowing the car was stolen.

However, Judge Yelavich decided to treat Rakena’s reckless driving causing injury – in which he bucked the victim from the bonnet – as the lead offence for sentencing purposes. It carries a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment.

Zacharius Manuera Totorewa Rakena appears in the Manukau District Court for sentencing after pleading guilty to attacking police and driving dangerously as a car theft victim clung to the vehicle's bonnet. Photo / Craig Kapitan

She settled on a 32-month starting point after factoring in uplifts for the various other charges. An additional six months were added for his prior criminal history and having offended while on bail and subject to prison release conditions.

She then allowed 45% in discounts for his guilty pleas, remorse, his troubled background and his efforts at rehabilitation. She noted that Rakena grew up surrounded by drugs, alcohol, gangs and physical abuse. A pre-sentence report noted his continued reluctance to distance himself from his own gang connections.

But the past four months on electronically monitored bail have been spent at Grace Foundation, where he received glowing reports for what appeared to be earnest efforts to change the course of his life. The judge noted that Rakena told a pre-sentence report writer he wanted to continue his work with the Grace Foundation regardless of whether he had to serve a prison sentence first.

“You have demonstrated over the past four months you have the capacity to turn your life around,” Judge Yelavich said.

Given the circumstances of the case, she said the community detention sought by the defence was too lenient. But she allowed six months’ home detention – in which he will continue to reside at the Grace Foundation – followed by 12 months of post-detention conditions.

She also ordered $2000 in reparations to two victims, noting the defendant didn’t have the ability to pay the full $5000 sought by the Crown.

Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.