Teen admits hotel rip-off during siege

A man who used Napier gunman Jan Molenaar's siege as a chance to rip off a hotel offering free accommodation for evacuees has admitted a string of charges including fraud, burglaries, trespass and carrying a knife.

Raniera Ropata Harris, 19, was near a police cordon sealing off Molenaar's Chaucer Rd house during the first night of the siege, on May 7, when he heard residents talking about how they were being sent to stay in hotels.

Harris lives in Ahuriri, some distance from Chaucer Rd, but he and a friend gave a false address and registered with the Red Cross as evacuated residents. The pair were taken to the Tennyson Inn and given a room for the night.

There they met three other associates, and arranged to have rooms next to each other. At 2am, Harris went to the hotel reception area and bar, where he was filmed by security cameras as he stole a laptop computer, cellphone and charger, credit cards, chequebooks, keys and alcohol.

He took his booty upstairs to a friend, then went to another hotel, where he used his Red Cross form to get another room for the rest of the night.

He told police he had stolen the items because he needed some money.

The offences came only a week after he had burgled the boutique County Hotel in Napier twice in one night. Both times he stole bottles of alcohol, stashed them in nearby rubbish bins and waited until he was sure the coast was clear before escaping with them.

Harris, who is in jail waiting to be sentenced in Napier District Court on June 3, has also admitted carrying a knife in public, trespassing at The Warehouse in Napier from which he had been banned for two years and stealing two cellphones from a Napier house.

He has denied two other burglary charges.

- The Dominion Post