An Auckland man who admitted to ambushing and fatally shooting a small-time drug dealer, fleeing with the victim’s wallet and drug stash as he slumped over dying in his car, has failed to convince a jury it was all an accident and that it was never his intent to rob anyone.

Ethan “Ecep” Dodds, 25, now faces sentencingwith three others close to him: his best friend, his mother and a woman who had been dating victim Benjamin “Dekoy” Mcintosh until his death — at which point she began dating Dodds instead.

Dodds and co-defendant Julius “Pete East” Te Hiva Ka, 27, a friend from childhood he referred to as his cousin, were both found guilty of murder late Friday after nearly two full days of deliberation. Jurors in the High Court at Auckland also found Tamirah Baker, 26, guilty of being an accessory after the fact to murder and unlawfully possessing the sawn-off semi-automatic rifle used to kill her ex.

Prosecutors had suggested Baker - described as having treated Mcintosh “with contempt” during their “dysfunctional” on-again-off-again relationship - played a crucial role in identifying him as an easy mark and helping her co-defendants lure him to the early morning robbery in the parking lot of a West Auckland reserve. But there’s no evidence she knew a gun would be used, they acknowledged, explaining that’s why she didn’t also face a murder charge.

Dodds’ mother, Donna Dodds, 61, had also been scheduled to join the trio in the courtroom dock, charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice after breaking her court-imposed curfew to rush her son out of Auckland immediately after the shooting, then providing a false alibi to police. However, she instead pleaded guilty earlier this month, just days before trial.

Donna Dodds is set to be sentenced next month. Justice Graham Lang on Friday set a May sentencing date for the other three.

Mcintosh, 36, died on the morning of June 3, 2022, after a groundskeeper at Harold Moody Park in Glen Eden found him unconscious and bleeding in his still-running car about 30 minutes after being shot. Paramedics arrived a short time later but he could not be revived.

Three days later, Baker and Ethan Dodds were arrested together following a high-speed pursuit that started near Baker’s family home in Dargaville and ended only after road spikes were deployed and the stolen vehicle Baker was driving was forced off the road. Ethan Dodds was in the passenger seat and the gun was in the back seat in plain view.

The two were acquaintances who barely knew each other before the shooting but things developed between them rapidly in the days that followed, Ethan Dodds claimed during his two days in the witness box. He also claimed he’d never met Mcintosh before shooting him.

Ethan Dodds said he had secretly brought a gun while tagging along with his cousin to what was supposed to be a routine $350 methamphetamine purchase because he wanted only to “scare” Mcintosh. He’s heard that Mcintosh had pulled a gun on another friend’s mother roughly seven months earlier, he said, refusing to identify the friend for jurors.

While at his mother’s Hillsborough home with Te Hiva Ka an hour before the shooting occurred, he described going into his room alone and pulling the gun out from under his mattress, then doing an elaborate check to make sure the firearm was unloaded. He said he then hid the gun in a bag, not pulling it out until he surprised Te Hiva Ka and Mcintosh with it in the middle of their drug deal.

Julius Te Hiva Ka, Ethan Dodds and Tamirah Baker were on trial together in the High Court at Auckland following the June 2022 shooting death of Ben McIntosh (background) in the carpark of a Glen Eden reserve. Photo / Dean Purcell

He was shocked, he said, when the gun fired accidentally as he went to lunge for Mcintosh inside the drug dealer’s car.

“It happened so fast. It was like a reflex,” he said, explaining that Mcintosh had looked like he was about to turn and run from the car. “I can’t really explain it. I guess I was trying to grab him or something.”

He acknowledged grabbing Mcintosh’s bag, containing his drugs and his wallet, as he fled the car. But he said he was acting on autopilot while in shock from what he thought was an unloaded gun somehow firing. Taking the other man’s valuables was never his intention for having the gun, he insisted.

“I grabbed it,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

Gang affiliation was not discussed during the trial but Ethan Dodds and a supporter in the courtroom gallery could be seen flashing what appeared to be Crips signs at one another after the jury had filed out one day.

Ethan Dane Dodds reacts to having his photo taken in June 2022, during his first appearance in the High Court at Auckland on a charge of murdering Ben Mcintosh. Jurors have now found him guilty. Photo / Dean Purcell

Te Hiva Ka also gave evidence, agreeing the firearm and Ethan Dodds’ confrontation with Mcintosh came as a total shock to him.

“What the f***?” he recalled saying in a panic immediately after the gun blast inside the car where all three sat. His cousin, he said, looked pale and panicked as well.

The whole matter, he said, left him feeling “pretty s***” and as if he was caught in the middle of something he wanted no part of. As an addict, he never would have knowingly burned a relationship with a dealer by trying to rob him, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield KC added.

But prosecutors painted a starkly different picture of the defendants through the trial, suggesting that all three were too strapped for cash to have made a legitimate purchase after Te Hiva Ka spent his last $200 on a methamphetamine purchase the night before. They also pointed to an angry text from Mcintosh to Baker the night before the shooting that appeared to suggest there had been a confrontation with Ethan Dodds earlier that day: “Tell ur new bf come try and take my s*** anytime f***ing clown tryna look tuff in front of u hahahaha gudbye.”

During cross-examination of Ethan Dodds and during his closing address, prosecutor Brett Tantrum repeatedly referred to what appeared to be a handwritten checklist for robbery that had been found among other papers in the defendant’s bedroom.

“Redemption” was scrawled in all caps at the top of the Star Wars-branded stationery, encircled by a doodled cloud and followed by eight bullet points: “no phones”, “no weak links”, “homework”, “no rash decisions”, “right equipment”, “transportation”, “alibi” and “no witnesses”. Ethan Dodds denied any knowledge of the list or that the handwriting was his.

Ben "Dekoy" Mcintosh was shot to death in West Auckland in June 2022. Ethan Dodds and Julius Te Kiva Ka have now been found guilty of murder.

The trio thought of Mcintosh as an “easy target” and worked together as a team - Baker with the inside knowledge, Te Hiva Ka with the excuse to lure him to the park and Ethan Dodds as the enforcer - to rob him that morning, Tantrum argued.

“My position is that nothing Mr Dodds said about the events of that morning was the truth,” Tantrum said, describing the defendant’s detailed account of carefully checking the gun was unloaded as having “defied belief”.

Jurors asked during their deliberations to examine the gun up close, out of the glass case in which it had been brought to the courtroom.

“What’s really happened is ... he got in the car deliberately with the firearm and he pulled the trigger aiming at Mr Mcintosh’s head,” Tantrum had said earlier. “The way he described it, it’s impossible for it to go off on accident.

“He has no respect for life. He’s not alone in the dock in that respect.”

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.