Auckland, NZ – A man has been jailed for firing a shot that sent a bullet within “mere centimetres” of a 15-year-old girl’s heart.
Alfred Latu pursued the victim’s minivan for approximately 12 kilometres before firing a shot into the vehicle, which was carrying the girl and her family. He denied he was the shooter, Stuff reported.
Latu was found guilty at trial of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, injuring with intent to cause grievous bodily harm and unlawfully possessing a firearm.
The sequence of events started on May 16, 2023, when a minor collision on Auckland’s Southern Motorway sparked a road rage incident.
Various news media reports show that Mr Latu, behind the wheel of a Mazda Axela with Sione Ngata in the passenger seat, subsequently began a “pursuit” of the minivan.
When Latu got up with the vehicle he fired the first gunshot, hitting just above the victim’s “heart, exiting near her left shoulder, while the other was to her right thigh, exiting to her right buttock”, the Stuff report says.
Another young woman’s middle-lower back was bruised from a bullet that didn’t make it all the way through the seat she was sitting in.
At one stage, the minivan made a desperate attempt to cross the road after a 111 call and reach a nearby gas station, where the Police were waiting. Latu then fled the scene.
The sentencing revealed Latu had a history of violence and was on bail for assaulting a mechanic and his son when he fired the near-fatal shot.
His lawyer, Jen Holden, addressed this, informing Judge Bonnar that Latu had undertaken rehabilitative efforts since his arrest.
Earlier this year, Ngata was sentenced to two months of community detention and 12 months of supervision after pleading guilty to charges of being an accessory after the fact.
