By Lucy Xia
The gang member who shot dead a man in Auckland last weekend was deemed by Corrections to be at low risk of reoffending after attacking someone in 2020.
Hone Kay-Selwyn, 31, shot dead Robert Horne – who police believed was unknown – at a bar in Ponsonby just after 10.15pm on Sunday.
Kay-Selwyn was found dead in a property in Taupō on Tuesday.
Court documents show Kay-Selwyn was sentenced to five months community detention and 10 months supervision after assaulting a stranger at a Taupō strip club in 2020.
According to the documents, Kay-Selwyn was at the Sin City strip club with his Killer Beez associates on February 1 of that year.
They said he knocked a man to the ground outside the club after an argument over a spilled drink.
The victim suffered significant cuts, swelling and bruising to his face and head and was hospitalized.
Prior to that attack, Kay-Selwyn had one conviction for possession of cannabis plants in 2018.
He had also breached bail ahead of sentencing for the Taupō attack.
A pre-sentencing report in relation to the assault stated that as it was his second conviction, the risk of reoffending was low.
“He has no history of violence and as such his risk of harm to others can also be assessed as low,” the report said.
The report said Kay-Selwyn said he was bullied at school and stopped not long after joining the Killer Beez gang at the age of 14.
Kay-Selwyn said his membership of the Killer Beez gave him a “sense of belonging”.
He told a probation officer that, looking back on his life, he regretted his “wasted years” and wished he could go back to elementary school and make changes.
The report also said Kay-Selwyn had tried to distance herself from criminal associates since the attack.
But the report said there were concerns for Kay-Selwyn if he failed to distance himself from criminal organizations and find gainful employment.
According to the report, he had been coming and going from school since he was 15.
Kay-Selwyn said his longest form of full-time employment was at New World for 15 months in the butchery department, then as acting assistant manager in the warehouse, until the job ended at the end of 2014.
He then started a trading course at Unitech, but was only able to attend for three months.
According to the report, Kay-Selwyn admitted that he sometimes drank excessively and was a heavy cannabis user. It recommended that he benefit from a violence prevention program and other counseling programs.