Waitematā FC player Raymond Kumar jailed for kicking opponent in face at match on Auckland’s North Shore

An amateur footballer who threw a coward punch at an opponent after the final whistle, then kicked the stranger in the face, breaking his jaw, is now serving a prison sentence and faces likely deportation.

“You go from no prior convictions to this,” Judge Hermann Retzlaff noted this week as Raymond Kumar appeared before him in North Shore District Court to be sentenced for that attack and for a more recent assault of two relatives.

Kumar, 24, was no stranger to trauma and violence, his lawyer noted. His father is also in prison, serving a 10-and-a-half-year term after a spree of violence in 2022 that included kidnapping Raymond Kumar’s mother and slitting a young girl’s throat with a fish-filleting knife in an attempt to murder her.

“He didn’t directly witness these events, but he saw the aftermath of them,” Phillip Osborne, for Raymond Kumar, explained to the judge.