Natalie Jensen avoids conviction on perjury after Angela Huata Springvale death
A teen girl who lied to police after the bashing death of a Springvale mother has been given a second chance after tragic submissions about her upbringing were heard.
Police & Courts
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A teenage girl has admitted to lying to the cops to cover her boyfriend’s tracks over his mum’s alleged bashing murder.
Natalie Jensen, then 18, was charged amid a lie she told police after her boyfriend Tia Minhinnick called her over to his Springvale home in the early hours of February 10, 2022.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard she was welcomed to the house about 2.30am by her 20-year-old boyfriend, and confronted with the grisly scene where the body of his mum, Angela Huata, 41, lay beaten.
Mr Minhinnick has pleaded not guilty to murder and is expected to face trial in August.
The court heard Ms Jensen attempted to perform CPR on the dead mother of five, cared for her infant and called Triple-0 “as soon as she could” just after midday, when the home was empty.
But she lied when she told police she’d not long arrived at the Glendale Rd property to find the front door and flywire open and just Ms Huata and the baby there.
Prosecutors allege these false statements gave the effect to “avoid implicating Minhinnick and to open at least a possibility that an intruder or some other person had killed Ms Huata”.
Just five days later, Ms Jensen conceded she hadn’t been truthful and was charged with impeding the police’s apprehension of Mr Minhinnick, which was later downgraded to perjury.
Following her guilty plea on Tuesday, Justice Michael Croucher handed Ms Jensen a six-month good behaviour bond without a conviction following tragic submissions about her background from defence lawyer Sam Norton.
Labelling her as an “exceptional person”, Mr Norton detailed Ms Jensen’s perseverance against a backdrop of her mother’s drug addiction, incarceration and eventual suicide when she was just 16.
The instability of Ms Jensen’s life - where they spent months homeless and living out of a car — was reinforced by the resume of her education.
She attended 16 different primary schools, including five in Prep alone, three high schools and one TAFE.
Now 19 and having moved to Cobram to live with her grandparents, Ms Jensen has found hospitality work and volunteers for a sporting club.
But Mr Norton said townsfolk have come to learn about her brush with the law, unfairly branding her a “murderer”.
“Country towns can be supportive and caring environments but they can also be unwelcoming and sometimes cruel,” Mr Norton said.
“Ms Jensen has unfortunately been on the receiving end of the latter.”
Justice Croucher noted that “most young people who have been exposed to the sort of life that she has would have — historically anyway — a pretty serious criminal history by now.”
“She has none,” His Honour said.
“She must have some sort of super resilience.
“A lot of people would just pack it in.”
Justice Croucher quoted to the court a famous line from American writer John Steinbeck: “There are some among us who live in rooms of experience we can never enter.”
“It fits her too, it seems to me,” His Honour said.
Ms Jensen made an undertaking to be of good behaviour for six months.
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