Steve Braunias: The crashing waves of grief as court hears of Baby Chance’s death

Steve Braunias at the trial of a man accused of murdering a 10-month-old baby.

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

There are times this past week in the High Court at Auckland, at the trial of a man
accused of the murder of a baby aged 10 months, when the awfulness of it, the horror of it and more so the sorrow of it, can rush at you like a sudden tide. You can be sitting there in courtroom 13, dispassionate in whatever role or function you occupy in the slow, orderly proceedings, presided over with kindness and good sense by Justice Christine Gordon, and then suddenly feel aware of a kind of surge. It gets to you. It creeps up on you. It builds and builds, rises up, until it crashes like a wave of grief for baby Chance Aipolani-Nielson, born February 10, 2021, died December 17, 2021.

Boston Wilson, 23, is charged with murder. He has been accused of striking the baby. The cause of death was blunt force trauma. “We do not know,” Crown prosecutor Frances Rhodes said in her opening address on Monday, “how many times he was struck.” Wilson has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers have said he did not intend to kill or seriously injure. In a police interview, he claimed he was kneeling down when he dropped the baby, who banged his head on the side of a table as he fell. “This is not supported by the medical evidence,” Rhodes told the jury. “This is not what happened.”

All murder trials are at once pitiful and pitiless. It’s routine for pictures of death to be presented and on Thursday afternoon in the courtroom there were images – CT and MRI scans – of a baby with a fractured skull. Earlier in the trial, one of the paramedics who gave evidence called Chance “the patient”, as in, “The patient was on the floor and the crew were working on him.” Another of the first responders called Chance “the child”, as in, “The child was not breathing whatsoever at any time.” But the language was more personal and more devastating when the CT and MRI scans were presented, and paediatric radiologist Dr Francessa Wilson said, “Baby Chance had no blood flow going to his brain at all.”

There were two sets of scans. The first were taken at 3.05pm on December 15, 2021, immediately after Chance was rushed from his home in Birkdale on Auckland’s North Shore to Starship Hospital. The second set, taken the next evening at 9.32pm, were pictures of a brain that had faded to grey. It looked as though the lights had gone out. Chance died the next day. Dr Wilson pointed to the scans with a red laser light. It danced across the pictures while she said, “So this is showing extensive, severe brain injury…So this one shows the majority of the brain is damaged…So this scan shows us that a very large proportion of the brain is damaged. Almost all of it.”

The last photos of Chance were also presented in court. They had been texted on the morning of December 15, 2021 to his mother Azure Nielson, who had true cause to reach for caps when she replied, “HE LOOKS SO CUTE”. He was propped up on a couch wearing an early Christmas present, a two-piece camo outfit. It had been given to him by his mother’s sister, Darien Aipolani-Williams, and her partner, Boston Wilson. They all shared the same three-bedroom home in Birkdale, along with the couple’s four preschool children. A busy, happy, loving house – five children, three adults – so the court has heard. 2021 was a huge year. Chance was born in February, his youngest cousin was born to Darien and Boston in November. 2021 was a great year, until it became the worst day of the worst year.

Chance’s mother went to work on the morning of December 15. Her sister Darien gave Chance a pouch of custard and made him a bottle. He was put down for a sleep in his bed, in the middle of a horseshoe of pillows. Darien Aipolani-Williams had a daily routine of meeting her father Rhys for coffee, and he picked her up around 12.30pm. The only people left in the house on Vandeleur Ave were Chance and Boston Wilson.

“There is quite a lot of acute blood in both of these pictures,” said paediatric radiologist Dr Francessa Wilson, when she danced the red laser light over the pictures of a death foretold. “These little green arrows point to more and more blood, at the front, and back, and all around both sides of the brain.” Other scans showed two fractures of the skull. “It’s not a simple crack in the bone. It’s a complex fracture.” The last set of scans, on the evening of December 16, 2021, were illustrated with little blue arrows. They were marked, “Brain that is not dead/dying.” Only a very small portion of the brain was not dead/dying. “Massive swelling of the brain,” said Dr Wilson. One of the scans showed retinal haemorrhages. “It looks a bit inky but all this black is blood,” said Dr Wilson.

“How severe,” asked Crown prosecutor Alysha McClintock, “would you describe these injuries?”

This was right at the very end of her questioning of the witness and by that stage it seemed the most graphic evidence was over – there were no more pictures to present, no more scans – but Dr Wilson silenced the courtroom when she replied, “One of the most severe brain injuries I’ve ever seen.”

Court was then adjourned for afternoon tea. Family sitting in the back of the court left to sit down in a row of seats outside the courtroom. One person was crying, and being held close. The tide of grief recedes for courtroom functionaries; you resume your duties, the trial carries on. The tide likely never goes out for the family of Chance Aipolani-Nielson, aged 310 days.

A document illustrating a family tree has been prepared for the jury. There are 17 people on it. The branches are connected: all lines lead to Chance, at the bottom left-hand corner of the page. Directly above him is his mother Azure. To her immediate right is her sister Darien, Boston Wilson’s partner. Obviously the relationship given the closest, most crucial analysis at the trial is between Boston Wilson and his nephew Chance, and what happened in that half-hour they were alone together in the home on Vandeleur Ave, Birkdale. But another relationship forms an emotional core of the trial: the two sisters, who both gave evidence this week, and were both models of courage and dignity, of tremendous poise.

Azure Nielson appeared on Tuesday morning. As soon as she sat down it seemed evident it was only a matter of time before she broke down and cried during the questioning of the death of her baby. In fact, it only happened once, briefly, quietly, agonisingly, her fingers and knuckles digging into her face, as though clawing out the tears.

It was when she was asked about first hearing that Chance was being taken to hospital. She left work and stepped out on to the street and saw the ambulance with Chance in it drive past.

Azure texted her sister from Starship hospital at 2.37pm, “He has a pulse. They still working on him so all is good right now.”

She texted again at 4.38pm, “Yep we fine sis, doctor said not to panic.”

Darien texted her back at 4.51pm, “Sis did they say what it could have been from?”

Azure texted her at 5.07pm, “Nurses are saying he is good.”

She texted again at 6.06pm and this was when everything changed, everything darkened, everything began to collapse and lead towards an upstairs courtroom in the High Court at Auckland. “The nurses think that he was hurt sis so cops and Oranga Tamariki are being involved. He has bleeding in his brain which means he may not survive. In other words police may come visit and talk to you guys in the next few days.”

The texts continued through the evening and until 4.46am. The messages from Azure became more formal. Sometimes they even read like journalism. The news was all bad. “Sis boy is dying.” The texts from Darien became more distraught, baffled, caught up in a nightmare. “Me and bos [Boston] are going crazy because we know we didn’t do anything. Honestly sis nothing had happened.”

Darien Aipolani-Williams appeared in court to give evidence on Wednesday morning. As soon as she sat down it seemed evident it was only a matter of time before she broke down and cried during the questioning about the death of her sister’s baby. In fact, she began to weep immediately. Her answers were all breaths and whispers, a cracked voice, and throughout she did something Azure did not do once, not even glancingly, in no shape or form: she looked at Boston Wilson, the accused, sitting in the dock with the word BLESSED tattooed on the side of his face.

They had been together since they were at school, she said. They met when they were 13, 14, she said. They had four daughters, she said. He was an involved father, she said. He treated Chance like his own son, she said. She hadn’t seen him since he was taken away for questioning and arrested, she said. She looked at him with deep longing, and trembled; when the court was adjourned for morning tea, she called out to him, “I love you.” He was led away to the cells and she lay her head down on the witness box, and covered it with her arm. The tissues beside her were a sodden lump.

She was the first to hear that Chance was in some kind of trouble. He said for her to ring an ambulance, that he had gone into Chance’s bedroom to check on him and found he wasn’t breathing. It was the first story he told about what had happened; the story changed over the next few days, under police questioning, and the last he said about it was in his third police interview, when he claimed he had dropped the baby, and wept, “I lost control.”

“Everything that happened was accidental,” his defence lawyer Lorraine Smith said in her opening address.

Much of the trial is actually a love story. The family tree itself was a story of love, of a close and supportive whānau – the aunts who looked after the kids, the father having his daily catch-up over coffee with his daughter, the two sisters sharing the same house, the teen mum narrative of Darien having her first baby at about 17 and now having four little girls all to the same dad. Lorraine Smith went further with this loving family portrait when she said in her opening address that Boston and Darien wanted to adopt Chance. That was confirmed by Boston’s aunt, Christina Wilson, who said in the witness stand the couple’s first child, a son, had died, and they wanted Chance to be the boy they always wanted.

But according to Chance’s own mum, all of this talk of adoption, this plan to add Chance to their family of four daughters, was news to her. Asked if she was aware of it, Azure Nielson said in court, “Not at all. No.”

When she finished giving evidence, she didn’t have to walk past the man accused of killing her baby. Security took him out of the dock before she left the courtroom. The next day, after her sister Darien finished giving evidence and court was adjourned for afternoon tea, Azure walked around the outdoor courtyard of the High Court by herself. Darien was with other family. It was a very cold afternoon. Darien wore a long fawn coat, Azure wore a white woollen jacket. They walked back in when the 15-minute break was nearly over. The two sisters did not cross paths.

The trial continues this week and is set down for another fortnight.