Brother wanted to lure man who impregnated 13-year-old girl to give him a ‘hiding’

Friday, 24 January 2025

A teenager has described sending messages to the man who got his 13-year-old sister pregnant in an effort to lure him to his home and “open him up with elbows”.

Luca Benedict Kercher Fairgray is on trial at the Auckland District Court.

Now aged 21, he has denied three charges of sexual connection with a young person under 16, but pleaded guilty to a charge of supplying cannabis to the girl.

The Crown’s case is that the girl met Fairgray online and told him she was 13 before they began a sexual relationship. Fairgray’s lawyers say the girl told their client she was 16.

Giving evidence by closed-circuit television, the brother said he got a text message from another sister, telling him his younger sister had an abortion and that she was bleeding.

His younger sister was in her bedroom with the door closed. He said he tried to talk to her through the closed door, but she denied she had had an abortion.

“I was concerned for her safety,” he told the court.

There was then a fight between his mother and his sister, and she ran away from home.

He said his sister came back to get some things but the phone and its contents were her main focus.

“She asked me to smash the phone,” he said.

The brother said he and his mother refused to hand it over and, when his sister left, he began going through the phone in the hope he could identify the man who got her pregnant.

“I saw some pics of him…. I went through [messaging application] Snapchat… I tried to lure him to my home.”

He said he posed as his sister, adopting some of the abbreviated acronyms she used on the messaging app, and invited the man to come to the house. He also told him to “bring a condom”.

The brother said the man responded, and seemed “pretty excited to come”.

“My intention was to lure him to the house and knock him down and open him up with elbows,” the brother said.

He said the man offered to bring gnocchi, garlic and tomato sauce.

Crown prosecutor Pip McNabb asked the brother if Fairgray turned up. He responded: “No, unfortunately he did not”.

Under cross examination from Fairgray’s lawyer, Susan Gray, the teenager confirmed the message about the condom had not been saved on the phone.

Snapchat has an auto deleting function and he said he was not a user of the application. He denied lying about the condom message.

The court also heard from the girl’s mother, who said she had not known about the relationship with Fairgray, the pregnancy or the abortion until she got a call from a doctor at the hospital.

She said the doctor told her that her 13-year-old daughter had had an abortion and there had been complications.

Later, when her daughter came to the house to get some things, the girl had been “hysterical” about getting her phone back, but she did not hand it over.

The mother said she was aware her son had tried to lure Fairgray to their home and give him a “hiding”.

When asked by Gray if she had reported that to the police, the mother said “No, I had ideas of my own at the time.”

She described her daughter as “childlike”.

“She’s very energetic and creative and naive. She saw the best in everyone and just wanted to have fun with her friends.”

Earlier, the court heard evidence from a close friend of the girl.

She spent time with the girl when the girl was in a relationship with Fairgray and saw a text message on the girl’s phone. She said the text message showed the girl telling Fairgray she was 13 years-old.

The friend’s police interview with a specialist child interviewer was recorded on DVD and was played in court.

The friend, who as a child witness cannot be named, said on one occasion she was sitting in Fairgray’s car with her friend and Fairgray.

“[Fairgray]’s like ‘oh, so you met [the girl] in primary school?’ I was like: ‘Yeah, we were in the same year’, and so, so that pretty much implied that we were the same age.”

The friend said she had spoken to the police after the girl had phoned her.

She said the girl had told her “how Luca’s lying and telling his lawyer and stuff that he thought she was 16 but I know that there were multiple times [when he’s said] ‘like, yeah, I know she’s 13’.”

Under cross examination from Gray, the friend said she had asked Fairgray “in a joking way” if he knew the girl was 13. “He said: ‘Yeah, I know’.”

She confirmed to Gray that she had not told police about that conversation but it did happen.

The court also heard evidence from a nurse who worked at an abortion clinic.

She said the clinic got a call from a male who identified himself as “Luke”. He said he was 15 years-old and met the 13 year-old at school.

The Crown’s case is that was Fairgray and he lied about his name, his age and where he had met the girl.

Fairgray did not take the girl to her appointment.

The trial has adjourned for the week and will restart on Tuesday when the Crown is expected to call the last of its witnesses.