'Blood everywhere': Youth witness' visceral account of bus stop killing

WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT

A 16-year-old was trying to beat his 10pm curfew last year when he drove past an odd scene at an East Auckland bus stop – “sketchy” enough that it made him slow down, then U-turn.

“[I] got a little closer and I started to see these two people attack what I thought was an old lady ... with what I thought was a baseball bat or something similar,” the witness told jurors today in the High Court at Auckland.

The violent scene – albeit viewed from across the street, in the dark and from a moving car – caused enough concern to the young driver that he immediately decided to call 111 and stopped to see if the person who had been seated at the bus stop was okay. He soon realised the person clearly wasn’t.

“Ambulance! Ambulance! This person is dead!” he recalled yelling to the dispatcher.

“The blood,” he answered today when asked why he believed the person slumped on the bus stop bench – later identified as American PhD student Kyle Whorrall – had already died.

“There was blood everywhere. On the ground, on the victim, on the seat.”

It was disturbing enough that he didn’t want to continue looking at it, so he drove his car around the corner, turned on his hazard lights and waited for police.

The witness cannot be identified because of his age at the time. He is the first person to give testimony in what is expected to be a weeks-long trial for N, U, B and F, who also cannot be named because of their similar ages at the time of Whorrall’s April 2025 death.

Whorrall, 33, was in the last stages of obtaining his doctorate in entomology at the University of Auckland when he was targeted while walking home from a grocery store “snack run” about 10pm that night, prosecutors said yesterday.

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He was allegedly robbed of his wallet in the attack.

Police examine the scene where American doctoral student Kyle Whorrall was killed in April 2025 while sitting at a bus stop in Meadowbank, Auckland. Photo / Alex Burton

Defence lawyers for the now 18- and 19-year-olds, however, have blamed the killing on a fifth teen who has already pleaded guilty to murder. They denied that their clients intended to participate in a robbery or anticipate that the stranger at the bus stop might be killed.

All have pleaded not guilty to murder. The majority of them, it has been noted, never got out of the car.

In their opening address yesterday, prosecutors acknowledged that the first witness didn’t get everything right – a contention the teenager readily agreed with.

He said he mistakenly thought, because of the lighting, that Whorrall’s long blond hair was grey – prompting him to think it was an older woman. He also described the two attackers as a man and a woman, although all five accused teens are male, and he thought one of them was swinging a baseball bat.

Prosecutors have said the severity of Whorrall’s head wound makes it clear it was a machete.

The witness was more certain that the fatal attacker, described as a medium-to-stocky build male, was wearing black track pants with a black hoodie pulled up over his head as he swung the weapon two or three times.

The second person, described as a smaller person he believed to be female, was wearing a similar outfit only dark blue, he said.

Kyle Whorrall was studying entomology at the University of Auckland.

“The woman, I believe, was throwing hands at the victim,” he said, clarifying that he meant punching or slapping. “She looked pretty aggressive.”

He recalled being on the phone with a 111 dispatcher immediately after the attack when he decided to turn around to check on the person at the bus stop.

Jurors also watched a video interview with the witness taken by a detective as he travelled back to the bus stop with the witness two days after the incident. In the video, the witness recalled that during the U-turn a black SUV with a broken headlight “just zoomed past me and I nearly crashed into him”.

He didn’t see who was inside the vehicle, but the broken headlight observation has been described by prosecutors as investigators’ first big break in the case. After reviewing CCTV in the area, police were able to identify the vehicle’s plates and traced it back to defendant N, who was then 16.

“I can see the person lying down and I instantly knew they were, like, dead,” he told the detective in the recorded interview.

Whorrall actually hadn’t died yet but the teen’s lay medical assessment wasn’t too far from reality. The catastrophically injured student would never regain consciousness, dying a short time later after paramedics rushed him to hospital.

“They had a large laceration on their head,” ambulance officer Glenn Walker described to jurors directly after the teen testified. “There appeared to be a lot of blood and lighter colour – what appeared to me as brain matter.”

Walker and his colleagues immediately put Whorrall on to a stretcher and into their rig, but there wasn’t much hope, he said.

“We figured out quite early that the injuries were unlikely to be sustainable with life,” he said. “The wound on his head was above the left eye to the back of his right ear.”

Justice Simon Mount sent jurors home early this afternoon. The trial is scheduled to resume on Thursday.

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.