Birkdale baby death: Steve Braunias on baby Chance verdict

This was a reluctant verdict. An 11-person jury – one couldn’t take any more of the grief of it after a week, and was excused – took three days to find Boston Liam Wilson, 23,
guilty of the murder of a baby, his nephew, Chance Aipolani-Nielson, aged 10 months.

The foreperson took no pleasure in delivering the unanimous verdict at 12:51pm on Wednesday at the High Court of Auckland. Another juror cried. On Tuesday afternoon they had signalled to the judge, Justice Christine Gordon, that they could not reach an agreement.

Raised voices were heard from the jury room; there was obviously no clear path to agreeing with the Crown case that Wilson, a loving father of four preschool daughters, who also loved Chance and wanted to adopt him as his own son, intended to kill him.

He was led away briefly as Justice Gordon thanked the jury. They were very sincere thanks. She presided over this trial with good grace and courtesy, as well as lovely diction – here is one of the few people left in New Zealand who pronounces the word “appreciate” with a pleasantly sibilant hiss.

But as she praised the jurors for their duty (“It is not an easy thing to do to sit in judgment”), all her niceties were interrupted and blasted away by the terrible noise of Wilson’s screams.

He screamed, shrieked, thumped the walls, and it was an agony shared by his family in the public gallery. There was no one hooraying, no one pumping a fist, none of the usual satisfactions in a guilty verdict.

It was a big family and they travelled as one, a loving whanau who were there for each other, including Wilson, a man found guilty of an act of violence beyond reason or mercy. The court has ruled that he bashed and shook a baby to death.

Chance died on December 17, 2021. He had been rushed to Auckland Starship two days earlier from a home in Birkdale, on Auckland’s North Shore, with fatal injuries. He had been alone in the house with his uncle.

Crown prosecutor Alysha McClintock came up with a shocking word to describe the way she claimed Boston Wilson threw Chance at a table: “fired”. As in, “He fired Chance to the ground, and his head hit the table.”

As in, fired like a bullet, at speed, with force. She reminded the jury in her closing address that medical evidence compared the type of force required to cause the blunt force trauma that Chance suffered to a TV falling on a child’s head, “and,” she added, “crushing it.”

Wilson elected to give evidence. He said that it was a series of accidents – by accident, he dropped Chance, who struck his head on a table, and when he rushed out the door with him to phone for help, Chance struck his head on a doorframe, again by accident. He also shook the baby, in an attempt to revive him, he said. “He went too hard,” said his defence lawyer, Lorraine Smith. “He was too young.”

She also said that it just didn’t add up and that particular claim felt entirely correct. Here was a guy who was raising four little girls and his only discipline was to call for help. He was surrounded by a close and supportive family. His partner, Darien Aipolani-Williams, sat behind him throughout the trial. “I love you,” she told him.

She collapsed in tears at the verdict. After the father of her children was brought back into the courtroom, Justice Gordon said he would be sentenced on September 21. He was taken away again. This time he tried to resist, facing Darien on the other side of the glass, and it took three security guards to prise his fingers off a chair and drag him away.

The courtroom went very silent after that. Darien wept silently with her head in her arms. Boston Wilson’s father, himself wiping away tears, led her out. Other relatives staggered away, in shock and grief. They were lovely people, a very close family.