An Auckland man accused of the fatal Boxing Day kidnapping of his long-time partner told jurors today that he had twice tried to kick her out of his car when the vehicle was stationary.

He was shocked, he said, when she belligerently and drunkenly opened the door as he was driving her home.

“She did it pretty suddenly, and I think it was to scare me or get my attention,” Jovan Aroha Zachariah Pora said from the witness box today after electing to testify on his own behalf in his High Court at Auckland trial.

He is the first witness for the defence in a trial that has been ongoing for the past two weeks. He has pleaded not guilty to kidnapping and “fright-response” manslaughter, which occurs when a victim acts in a manner dangerous to their life out of fear of another person.

Pora, who turns 22 later this week, testified today that he slowed down and put on his hazard lights after the first door-opening incident, which occurred after a Christmas night and early Boxing Day morning in 2022 that had been filled with a toxic combination of relationship drama and drinking.

At that point, he said, girlfriend Katelyn Rua-Tuhou was still talking but it was more to herself rather than arguing with him.

“I had switched off by that point,” he said. “I just wasn’t going to get drawn into any arguments. I was tired. Katelyn was clearly drunk. My whole goal and mission was to get her home...”

Rua-Tuhou would die just a short time later, after the defendant had entered the Southern Motorway. CCTV played for jurors earlier in the trial showed the door opening again. Pora said he could not remember where the car was when the door opened again.

“I remember entering the motorway, then driving straight - I was just trying to focus,” he said. “Then I heard some wind suddenly out of nowhere. It was whistling past the car.

“I seen the car door open and I seen Katelyn leaning against that door. I felt like Katelyn was about to fall out of the car. I just reached. I reached over, grabbed her, pulled her upright.”

But when he turned his eyes back to the road, he realised he had veered out of his lane and tried to correct, he testified.

“That’s when I began to lose control of the car. When we began to spin, the car doors go open again. I reach to grab the back of her shirt or bra, but she passed from my grip. I just remember hitting the barrier and her being gone from my grip.

“I just remember the car continuing to spin and me being alone in the car.”

Kidnap accused Jovan Pora returns to Manukau District Court in 2022 after being charged with manslaughter as well. Photo / Dean Purcell

When he got out of the car, he found her bleeding and unresponsive on the motorway. First responders have testified that she died at the scene.

At the outset of the trial last month, Crown prosecutor Henry Benson-Pope said Rua-Tuhou had voluntarily gotten into the defendant’s car that morning after he arrived at her father’s Manurewa home. But it was clear she did not want to leave with him as he drove off, he suggested.

“He would not stop the vehicle,” Benson-Pope said. “He would not let her out.”

Defence lawyer Vivienne Feyen told jurors today during her own opening address that Pora had no intention that morning of taking anyone against their will. Her client had only gone to pick up his girlfriend of three years because a family member of hers had requested he take her home, Feyen said.

“She wasn’t dragged outside by Jovan Pora,” she said. “As far as Jovan knew and believed, she was in his car because she wanted to go home.”

She said the incident was not the first or even the second time Rua-Tuhou had tried to jump out of a moving car.

“When Katelyn drank she became a different person,” Feyen said. “When Katelyn drank her actions were violent, volatile and unpredictable.”

The big issue for jurors to decide, she predicted, will be whether she opened the car door out of “self-preservation or intoxication”.

Prosecutors have not yet had a chance to cross-examine Pora, who will continue testifying this afternoon.

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.