A promising rugby league player turned 501 deportee who was kicked out of Australia after a six-hour spree of drunken violence in which 10 different strangers were attacked has now been sentenced to prison in New Zealand following a random attack on a couple in Auckland’s city centre.
Papakura resident Frank Fualema, 25, had asked Judge John McDonald for home detention as he stood in the dock today in the Auckland District Court.
Police were neutral to the home detention request, although a prosecutor acknowledged that Fualema’s offending was “certainly serious” when pressed by the judge to give her opinion on cases in which “innocent people walking down the streets in the CBD are just attacked”.
Fualema and two co-defendants were arrested last August following the 1.30am confrontation near Auckland’s Britomart train station.
Reading from the agreed summary of facts, the judge said it was a four-on-one attack in which the first victim was punched in the head, knocked to the ground and then suffered repeated kicks to his head and his body. The man’s partner was also hit in the head and pushed into scaffolding, the judge noted.
“Absolutely no explanation was put forward by you as to why you chose to attack this man in this way,” Judge McDonald said, noting that Fualema would later tell a probation officer he was so drunk that morning he didn’t remember what he had done.
The judge ordered 18 months’ imprisonment, with four of those months an uplift…