Boston Wilson appears in the High Court at Auckland charged with the murder of 10-month-old Chance Kamanaka O Ke Akura Aipolani-Nielson (inset) in Birkdale in 2021. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Boston Wilson appears in the High Court at Auckland charged with the murder of 10-month-old Chance Kamanaka O Ke Akura Aipolani-Nielson (inset) in Birkdale in 2021. Photo / Jason Oxenham
New mother Azure Nielson was at work at a North Shore early childhood centre just 10 days before Christmas in 2021 when she received the first terrifying call.
Chance, her 10-month-old son whom she had left at home in her sister’s care, wasn’t breathing. She needed to come home immediately, she was told.
Nielson at first thought her sister Darien Aipolani-Williams was playing a horrible prank on her, preying on every parent’s worst nightmare.
“But then when she started crying it got to me, so I ran to the office and I started crying,” Nielson recounted to jurors in the High Court at Auckland today as she testified in the murder trial of Boston Liam Wilson, her sister’s partner.
“I didn’t want to believe that [Chance] was...” she said, trailing off with her thought uncompleted - momentarily unable to speak as she silently wiped away tears.
Prosecutors have accused Wilson, 23, of having fatally beaten baby Chance that afternoon during a short period of time when he was alone with the baby in the Birkdale home shared by the defendant, the two adult sisters and multiple other family members.
“I lost control. I just lost it,” he is alleged to have told police days after baby Chance died in hospital.
His lawyers, however, contend that any injuries to the child that day were accidental.
Jurors were read aloud today the hours-long sequence of texts and calls between the two sisters that day after Nielson followed an ambulance that rushed to Auckland’s Starship hospital with her son unresponsive in the back.
Jurors were shown this photo of 10-month-old Chance Aipolani-Nielson wearing his new outfit, an early Christmas present, on the morning of December 15, 2021 just hours before emergency responders found him critically hurt inside his Birkdale home. His uncle, Boston Wilson, was subsequently charged with murder.
The texts from Aipolani-Williams had started in a much more jovial tone that morning, explaining that she and Wilson, who have four children together, wanted to allow all of the five children in the household an early Christmas present. An adorable photo was sent a short time later showing baby Chance seemingly in good health and wearing his new camouflage outfit - his first Christmas gift ever.
But by 1.30pm, the notes from the sister were more frequent and frantic.
“He is going to Starship hospital,” she wrote. “Heart beat going. Whats your number?
“Dad coming to get you.”
Throughout the afternoon, the sister texted messages of support. But the exchanges got more tense as the day progressed.
“Sis, did they say what it could have been from?” Aipolani-Williams asked via text just before 5pm.
“Still trying to figure it out,” the mother responded, adding a few minutes later: “The nurses think that he was hurt sis so cops and Oranga Tamariki are being involved. He has blood in his brain which means he may not survive.” She ended with a crying emoji.
By 10.25 that night, the mother told her sister: “Well, they said it’s definitely happened today, someone has hurt him today. Ummm, he most likely going to die. That’s what was said so if you know nothing and have told me the full story sis then all good but man wtf?!”
“Nothing happened today tho at all you should know that,” the sister told her.
Flowers and toys were placed outside the Birkdale home where 10-month old Chance Aipolani-Nielson was fatally hurt in December 2021. Photo / Dean Purcell
The texts continued until about 4am.
“The nurses have done a scan and they think it’s more than a fall so something or someone not blaming anyone has hurt him real bad,” the mother wrote.
Her sister replied: “me and bos are going crazy because we know we didn’t do anything.”
In the witness box today, baby Chance’s mother said she had observed the defendant being an involved, caring father for his own children, whose ages ranged at the time from six weeks to four years old. He would change nappies, put them to bed and play with them, she said, also acknowledging that he appeared to treat baby Chance as he would his own children.
But his body language “was off” that afternoon as he and her sister dropped off supplies to the mother at the hospital.
“He seemed a bit fidgety and wasn’t really looking at me,” the mother said.
She had gone back to work when her son was five weeks old, relying primarily on her own mother - also living in the Birkdale home - to care for Chase. But her mother had gone to Hawaii weeks before the incident to care for a sick relative.
She had hoped to enrol her son at the childcare centre where she worked after the summer holidays, she said.
“He was a healthy baby boy,” she said.
Rhys Williams, who is Aipolani-Williams’ father, also shed tears today as he recalled how the incident unfolded that day. He had gone to the Birkdale home late that morning to pick up his daughter so they could buy some baking materials and get a coffee, he said, explaining that the baby was still napping when they left him in Wilson’s care.
They received a frantic call from the defendant about an hour later as they were driving home.
“This boy’s not breathing! This boy’s not breathing!” he recalled Wilson saying over speakerphone. “What do I do? What do I do?”
He instructed the defendant to start CPR while Williams called 111, he said.
As they raced home, they asked the defendant what had happened.
“He said ... ‘I heard coughing or something and I went to get the boy and the boy wasn’t breathing,’” Williams recalled.
The witness described his daughter’s partner as a loving caregiver, both to his own children and to Chance. Williams said he had previously overheard the couple discuss adopting the boy because “they were worried that [Chance] wasn’t getting as much attention as he should”.
Williams also recalled noticing a day before the incident happened that the boy looked a bit slow, like he was having trouble paying attention.
“He wasn’t his normal, happy self,” the witness said,
“I actually said to Azure I was a bit concerned about him. I said, ‘Is he okay?’
“She said, ‘Oh, he’s alright.’
“I actually told Azure that she should take him to see a doctor the next day. She said she had work.”
Williams said he had been a bit disappointed in the mother’s response, wanting her to be more proactive.
Prosecutors acknowledged as the trial began yesterday that the child had been recovering from a cold or flu in the week prior to his death. But the cause of his death was blunt force trauma to the head that experts believed must have happened shortly before he became unresponsive that day, they have alleged.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
