A Samoan seasonal worker has been jailed for at least five years and four months for brutally raping a teenage girl near Arrawarra on the NSW mid north coast in late 2023.
Agaalofa Agaalofa, 27, pleaded guilty on the first day of his trial at Coffs Harbour District Court in September to four charges of sexual intercourse without consent and one charge of assault – for spitting in his 17-year-old victim’s face – and was sentenced by Judge Michael McHugh on Thursday.
Judge McHugh handed down an aggregate sentence of eight years backdated to January 30, 2024, and told Agaalofa via Samoan interpreter that he was likely to be deported after his release and would be put on the NSW Child Protection Register for 15 years, ABC News reported.
The judge noted that Agaalofa weighed 163kg to his victims’s 45kg, that the girl was a stranger, that he exposed her to pregnancy and disease, and that there was a clear lack of consent during the violent rape on November 10, 2023, where the farm worker ambushed the girl as she walked along the beach and dragged her into bushes.
“I don’t think I have ever seen a stronger case from the Crown on consent,” he said.
“During the course of the assault, she used Siri to contact her mother and said, ‘I am being raped’. The evidence of the complainant, in my view, is an exceptionally strong case.”
But Judge McHugh also applied sentencing discounts for the late guilty plea, and took into account a letter of apology he wrote to the victim from jail.
Another Samoan fruit picker was originally wrongfully arrested and charged over the attack, but the court previously heard Agaalofa was tracked down to Pacific Islander seasonal worker accommodation after the girl did her own “detective work” and tracked her phone that he stole months later.
Agaalofa, who was brought to Australia under the government’s Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, claimed he found the phone on the beach, but his DNA matched swabs taken from the victim’s vagina.
The Arrawarra rape sparked anger in the region at the time, with local residents complaining they were “living in fear” of the hundreds of Pacific Islander fruit pickers working for berry giant Costa Group and two labour hire firms.
“It’s been ongoing trouble – fights, drunkenness, trespassing, breaking into people’s homes,” a spokesperson for the Little Arrawarra community action group said at the time.
“We are outnumbered probably three-to-one by the labour workers. It’s like the Wild West, these big six-foot-three Pacific Islander blokes on this rampage. It’s supposed to be a dry site, it’s absolutely not. They are, for want of a better word, shitfaced most of the time.”
Four months before the rape a concerned resident wrote to the Coffs Harbour mayor, warning: “As recently as last weekend my 13-year-old daughter can no longer go to the beach on her own.
“She has been followed, watched and tried to be spoken to by the older male fruit pickers living in the park. We will call the police next time, because there will be a next time.”
Header image: Left, Arrawarra beach. Right, the fruit picker accommodation at Arrawarra (Little Arrawarra).
The post Samoan fruit picker weighing 163kg jailed for brutal rape on NSW beach first appeared on The Noticer.
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