Kei nga ihoiho o nga maunga whakahi, kei nga wai whakatere taniwha, nau mai tahuti mai ki Te Hui. Ko Mihingarangi tenei e mihi atu nei ki a koutou katoa. Welcome to The Hui, Maori current affairs for all New Zealanders. E taro ake nei ` 22-year-old Chozyn Koroheke was the apple of her father's eye. She was my princess, she was my baby, she was our only girl, she was the youngest. But in 2017 his princess was murdered in cold blood by her boyfriend. The stuff that came out of his mouth when he hit the stand was unbelievable ` the lies that came out of his mouth. He was so arrogant that he thought he could talk his way out of a murder charge. United by tragedy. Jason Koroheke has connected with the aunt of Marie Harlick, who was murdered by her partner, Robert Hohua, in 2017. At least with Marie, I have got words for her, and she's got words for me, cos we've been down the same road. And unless you've been down that road, what do you say to someone that's happened? There are no words. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2018 More than half a million New Zealanders are harmed through domestic violence each year, and on average, 13 women are killed as a result. One of these women was 22-year-old Chozyn Koroheke. She was murdered by her former partner in brutal circumstances, leaving her parents to raise her tamariki. Her dad, Jason Koroheke, talks about the impact of this senseless crime on his whanau. Anei te purongo a Ruwani Perera. Jason Koroheke will always wonder what might have been. It's groundhog day. It goes over and over and over in my head. It's like a tape that keeps playing over and over and over again. He's a father with a broken heart following the death of his precious daughter,... She was my princess, she was my baby, she was our only girl, she was the youngest. ...shot in cold blood by her abusive boyfriend of just a few months. I beat myself up every day about what I didn't do. I didn't help my daughter enough. Mother-of-two Chozyn Koroheke met her killer, Turiarangi Tai, online through mutual friends. Within six months she would be dead. He was over her house might have been Christmas time, and she said, 'Oh, Dad, this is my boyfriend.' So, yeah, that's probably the first time I met him. It wouldn't have mattered what I thought, anyway. She was a free spirit. So even if I went over there and said, 'What are you doing with that guy?' or whatever, it wouldn't have mattered to her. So, um, yeah, she definitely made her own mind up. 23-year-old Turiarangi Tai had a lengthy criminal history, including several convictions for violent offending. Tai himself had been a victim of sustained physical abuse by his father and was in and out of foster care, where he was subjected to more violence. Chozyn was strong, intelligent, and beautiful. But her father says Tai dominated her to the point where she was too terrified to ask for help. Was she tough? Yeah, she was tough. That's why I said he beat the courage out of her ` he had to of, for her not to say anything and for her not to say, 'This is what's happening, 'this is how I'm living my life.' Chozyn became the target of Tai's violent outbursts ` beating her with his fists, his knees, a knife, a rock, and on one occasion a steel pole. She confided in friends about her increasingly dangerous relationship and expressed a desire to leave. But she kept her dad, Jason, in the dark. She was too scared to say anything about anything to me. The one time I confronted them about what was happening, she defended him. She said things like, 'Oh, Dad, we've been having a few drinks and we started having an argument, 'and this and this happened.' Now I understand that that was done out of fear. I didn't think at the time that this was leading to this. In April last year, Chozyn was living with her older brother in Pakuranga. Her relationship with Tai had been on again-off again, and Tai had grown suspicious she'd been unfaithful. After a night of bingeing on alcohol and meth, Tai flew into a rage, pointing a loaded 12-gauge shotgun at Chozyn's head, jabbing the barrel into her face. He then lowered the gun, firing into her stomach. Tai attempted CPR, but fled the scene when paramedics arrived, making a run for it not knowing whether Chozyn was dead or alive. Tai left her to bleed to death. He did what he did, and then he calmly left the house, went up the road to the garage, got himself some gas, some cigarettes, and then he used her money card to pay for it ` like nothing had happened. He is a coward. Any man that hits a woman and does what he did, they're cowards. Not just him. Anybody that does that, they're cowards. Jason and his wife were determined the farewell to their daughter would be special. Those final moments precious to them and their moko. We brought her home, laid her down on the mattress in our whanau home, where I was brought up. I didn't want her coming home in a coffin purely for the reason that once she was in a coffin you couldn't lie down with her and give her an awhi, and give her a little cuddle. For that first night I got her children and we lay down, had a bit of a cuddle with her and my sisters and all our immediate family. And anybody that really wanted to could come over that day and they could have a little bit of an awhi with her, cos she was there in body. People came and people came. And they just kept comin', so... (SNIFFS) Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people came. Yeah. My friends came, her friends came, people I didn't know came, people from Australia came. My friends from Australia got on the plane and flew over. It was like... Um... Yeah, the support was overwhelming, so... I'm humbled by that now. Mm. And I chose to cremate her for the simple reason he was on the run for two weeks. And five days into him being on the run, I refused to put her in the ground where he could go visit her grave and say 'I'm sorry.' I refuse to let that happen. And I don't want him going there in the next 20 years either. If the Koroheke whanau thought the worst was over, they were wrong. Despite the damning evidence against him, Tai pleaded not guilty to murdering Chozyn. Turiarangi Tai admitted he pulled the trigger, but said it wasn't intentional. Like I said, the gun just went off. The stuff that came out of his mouth when he hit the stand was unbelievable ` the lies that came out of his mouth. He was so arrogant that he thought he could talk his way out of a murder charge. He said he did shoot her, but he said it was an accident. It was no accident. He meant to do what he meant to do, and he had absolutely no remorse. Jason Koroheke sat through every day of the month-long murder trial, hearing for the first time of how the violent attacks on his daughter escalated during the last six weeks of her life. He could have spared us that four-week trial. But in hindsight I'm glad he didn't, cos now I know. I know everything ` every second of what happened right up to when he walked in that house with the gun. You accept you shot her with your shotgun, Mr Tai, is that correct? Yes. So you accept now that you are at least guilty of manslaughter. Yes. I definitely didn't know about some of the things that I found out in the court case. And to this day I carry that with me now, and I always will. You take this box and you put all the bad stuff that happened with Chozyn and the stuff to do with that, and you put it in a box and you lock it and you put it away in your mind. And... that's the only way I can deal with it. Cos if I don't lock it away and have it around me all the time, I'm a goner. In April, a jury took two and half days to find Tai guilty of Chozyn's murder. That didn't have any effect on me at all. He means nothing to me. 'I refuse to think about him. I don't even have hatred for him because that would consume my life, and I refuse to let that happen. So he's actually a nothing to me, he's a zero. And I actually told him that once ` 'You're a zero. I don't care about you; I never will.' I'm just gonna move on with life. He was on a one-way track to where he's ended up now, anyway. He just happened to run into my daughter. Unfortunately. After the break ` two months on from the murder trial, Jason Koroheke finally confronts his daughter's killer at his sentencing. You had every intention of doing what you did. And two whanau whose lives have been shattered by domestic violence find comfort in raising the children who are left behind. I've lost my niece; he's lost his daughter. But we still have them. We still have them in those little children that we nurture and we love every day. Kia mau tonu mai ra ka hoki mai tatou akuanei. Auraki mai ano. Jason Koroheke and his wife waited 12 months before a jury found Turiarangi Tai guilty of killing their daughter. A year on, they're picking up the pieces of their shattered lives and caring for their mokopuna. Here's Ruwani Perera with part two of Chozyn Koroheke's story. Turiarangi Tai is serving a life sentence for the murder of his former girlfriend, 22-year-old mother of two Chozyn Koroheke. It was Tai's final abusive act in a relationship that lasted just a few months. The case is yet another appalling commentary on the culture of violent domestic abuse which pervades parts of NZ society and which has previously been called a scourge on our community. 23-year-old Tai will be 40 before he's eligible to seek parole. Hopefully I'm well and truly still alive, cos I want to be there that day in 17 years' time when the Parole Board say, 'What do you think?' and I'll still tell them, 'Here's the box, I'm gonna open it and I'll tell you all over again ` 'It hasn't gone away, it won't go away. I've just put it away somewhere 'so I can carry on living life for the kids.' That stuff doesn't go away. Never does. It won't. Tai was sentenced in June. Chozyn's father, Jason Koroheke, finally able to address his daughter's killer. I did get some satisfaction out of, 'Yep, I will read this to you, 'and you will have to listen to what I've got to say.' You controlled her to the point you were proud of yourself. Must have made you feel good. You treated her like a trophy. Chozyn's aunt, Claudia Koroheke, described dressing her niece for her tangi and the shock of seeing the marks that covered her niece's body. So with the help of Aunty Bella, we dressed Chozy. And saw bruising from previous violence on her arms and her face. And this stays with me to this day. Chozyn came into this world so perfect and left it broken and battered. More than a year on, 49-year-old Jason Koroheke is still haunted by the murder of his only daughter. The car is a good place to cry cos no one can see you. You're just driving down the road and you know that things aren't flash, and it all comes back and hits you ` cos it does. And you have those days that aren't good days. I call them Chozyn days. And no one can see you cry, and you can cry as much as you like. There's less Chozyn days now, but definitely in that first year there was plenty of them. What keeps Jason and his wife going is raising their moko, ages 5 and 3. Chozyn's daughter is still too young to understand what happened to her mum. When it first happened she asked about her mum, and she said, 'When can I talk to Mummy?' Cos we told her that Mummy was an angel. I said to her, 'Mummy will talk to you when you dream.' And she said to me, 'I hope I can hurry up and go to sleep so I can talk to Mummy.' (VOICE CRACKS) It's stuff like that that's hard. Hard too for Jason and his wife, Nadine. Dealing with the brutal death of their only daughter has been the greatest test of their almost 30-year marriage. I've said things to her that I've never said to her in the 27 years before, and it's all to do with what's happened. Someone who understands Jason's pain and the devastating impact of domestic violence is 55-year-old Marie Harlick. Marie helped raise her niece and her namesake, Marie, who was like a daughter to her. 37-year-old Marie Harlick met a similar fate to Chozyn. In 2016 Marie was savagely attacked by her ex-boyfriend Robert Hohua, killed in her Opotiki home in front of her 19-month-old daughter. Marie is now the child's legal guardian. Which foot first? This one? when she climbs into bed, she snuggles up to me, and that little arms goes around my neck. And that little arm was the same little arm that hung on to her mother's neck that dreadful night. And I'm just so proud it's my neck that it gets wrapped around every night, you know? And I can be there for her. Remarkably, Chozyn's children would bring these two families together. I met Chozyn one time at the day care. And she brought the children in. She was beautiful. Chozyn was beautiful. And after Chozyn died, Marie connected with Jason. I reached my arms out and I says to him, 'It's gonna get better.' It's just so raw. 'I'm so sorry. I know exactly how you feel, Jason.' And we were just two broken people, standing there, just talking. The cases are very different, but the same basis of what happened are very similar. If anything, we can probably both understand each other's pain. How are you? Good. Nice to see you. You too. Have a seat. Have a seat. Thank you. Once strangers, their tragedies have brought them together. Just a horrible thing to have in common. It is. It is. While Jason and his whanau have been blown away by the support they've received from the public, no one can truly understand their pain. At least with Marie, I have got words for her, and she's got words for me. Cos we've been down the same road. And unless you've been down that road, what do you say to someone? There are no words. We never get over it; we learn to manage it. Marie's work at the Women's Refuge in South Auckland has helped her better understand how women like Chozyn and Marie become trapped in violent relationships. It's challenging trying to help someone who feels totally worthless. If I can reach out and tell somebody I'm sorry for their loss, it helps me to heal by helping someone else. I'm not very good at healing in myself. I manage myself. But when I can reach out to someone like Jason and say, 'I know,' that's all I have to say ` 'I know.' Seeing Chozyn's two children thrive is helping Jason and his wife to slowly rebuild their lives ` a ray of hope during their darkest days. We're their parents now. We're Nanny and Poppa, but we're the parents of those kids. We've tried to make life as good as it can be. Are they a part of your healing? Without a doubt. They are part of the healing, so those days when you're feeling shitty and you're lying in bed and you don't want to get up, those are the days the kids are right with you, and you can give them a cuddle and stuff like that. So without them... They're every part of the healing. Ka nui te aroha ki a koutou ki to whanau, Jason. Na Ruwani Perera tera purongo. If you or someone you know is in a violent relationship or needs help, contact the national Women's Refuge along with a whole lot of ones that you can google. The helpline for the Women's Refuge is 0800 733 843. Ka hoki mai Te Hui akuanei. Auraki mai ano. Tamaki-makaurau was host to the world premiere of the Maori film Merata Mita: Decolonising the Screen. The powerful documentary of her life has been told through the words of her tamariki. Let's take a peek. My mother once said what you see when you look at an archival film are resurrections taking place. A past life lives again, and something from the heart and the spirit responds. One of my primary goals is to decolonise the screen and to indigenise a lot of what we see up there. For me, it is blood for blood. (PEOPLE YELL) Foot soldiers, uh, don't have a very high status. But they have to be very brave and very determined. People used to look at me in utter disbelief when I talked about filming. And I think it was because there are not only no Maori film-makers in the country, but the fact that I was also a woman. And joining me now the producer and director of the film, Chelsea Winstanley and Hepi Mita, who is also the potiki of the whanau. Tena korua. BOTH: Kia ora. Well, those who do know about Merata Mita will know that she was a Maori documentary maker. But through your film, what else will they know about your mum? Well, the main detail that stands out to me and the main challenge that she offers to everybody out there today, is that she is the only Maori woman to have solely written and directed a feature film. That was back in 1988, 30 years ago. And to this day, she's the only Maori woman to have achieved that. And I'm immensely proud of that, but I don't think it's something that we as a nation should be proud of. But going into that story and looking at how she became that woman was the journey that I was interested in. And she was a mother of five before she ever made a single documentary or a feature film. And so I took it from the perspective of the potiki, of the baby looking back at his mother's life history. I learnt so much about your mum. I thought I actually knew your mum, and then I realised that I knew very little about her life. You learnt lots of things on the way too. What were some of the things that you discovered? Yeah, well, I thought I knew a lot about her too, but turns out` She was a very complicated woman, and she was a very divisive woman for her time because back in her day, in the '70s and '80s, she was considered a radical. So funny to me to look back on that and to see what people thought was radical back then. We're talking about equal rights for women, we're talking about honouring the Treaty of Waitangi. And that was all radical. The other interesting thing about that was, as the potiki, I was born at a time where Mum had already become successful. Just the year after I was born, she made her first feature film. We got to live overseas in the United States. So I never really got to see the radical era, and I was of a generation where those ideas weren't as radical. So it's been interesting for me personally just to see how the country's attitudes have shifted and in some ways also stayed the same over that period of time. And to see just how hard it was for my mother to get to the places that she got to in my lifetime. Chelsea, this is an amazing film. How important is this film for New Zealand? It's super important. The fact that she's a working mother, a Maori woman, and she was a trailblazer and doing all those fantastic things, I think for us as women in general who are working parents and still out there trying to do our own things, it's really important for us to be reminded that we don't have to, kind of, blossom at any particular time in our career or lifetime. I'm in my 40s now and I take heart in knowing that, as Hepi mentioned, his mum made that film, Mauri, in her 40s as well. To me, that's encouraging. We have the opportunity to say what we need to say at any given point in our lives. I think that's really important. What will you take away from the film ` something that you didn't know and has left an impression on you? Oh, there's so many things. Like you both mentioned, I felt very honoured that I had the opportunity to work with her later on in her life and before she passed, and I thought, 'Gosh, I know this woman.' But I realise I didn't know much at all either. So many things. Like, her life growing up in Maketu, a small community with very true Maori values to then hitting the heights of Hollywood. I mean, wow. And the breadth and depth of what she covered in that lifetime. There's too many things to mention, to be honest. That's what I love about her ` when she did the transition from the haukainga to the city for the reasons that she had to, she went with this understanding of her tikanga, and she wanted to challenge people based on the fact that she knew it. I just wanted to touch on the fact that you are the youngest of six. And there's a big distance between you and the oldest of your brothers, who feature a lot in this film. Having told their stories and your mum's stories, how do you now reflect on the lives of your brothers or the courage that they had? And your sister, sorry. Well, it was really cool for me because they were privy to parts of her life that I was never` I wasn't even a thought in my mother's mind. And it was cool as well because I realised at a very early stage in this process that my eldest brother and the two after him were the only ones who sort of knew my mum as a housewife, as a teacher from her very, very humble beginnings. And they were on that journey with her through to the heights that she reached. And the things that they went through are so different from my upbringing. I was very, very privileged in my upbringing. And as a solo mother living in Auckland in the '70s, it was a struggle to get accommodation because of discrimination of her gender, because of discrimination against her race, because of discrimination that she was a solo mother. This was a country where divorcees were discriminated against because` No DPB. She was all on her own. No DPB, yeah. Working three jobs. I knew that she had a lot of kaha. I knew that she was tough; you didn't wanna mess with her. But I didn't realise that at that very fundamental level, at that ground level, that she had to go through that struggle. One of the other things that she used to do was she was a cleaner at night. These were very, very humble origins. And I always viewed my mother` She carried herself with such a dignity and grace, and so all of that was such a surprise to hear. And it really humbled me to understand that side of her. Kia ora. Tena korua. Te murau a te mano te wenerau a te tini, he wahine toa to mama. Kua hikina Te Hui mo tenei ra, but we leave you with the voices of Maori women who continue the mahi of Merata Mita at the rally against racism following the cancellation of alt-right Canadian speakers touring Aotearoa. Newshub Nation's next. Pai marire ki a tatou katoa. This rally is so we can continue the essential work of rejecting racism and hatred and division. We are now united together in a single kaupapa tonight. I welcome in humility our refugee community, our migrant community,... (CROWD CHEERS) ...our Pacific community. We are here to seek peace and harmony, to promote together tino rangatiratanga. That's why we're here tonight. (CHEERING, APPLAUSE) Copyright Able 2018 ALL: He mea tautoko na Te Mangai Paho. The Hui is made with support from New Zealand On Air.