KEY POINTS:
He arrived in Auckland with little more than the clothes he was wearing. We'd last seen him as a gangly, smiley teenager, before his parents' marriage ended badly, and his mother, bitter and hurt, sent him to her relatives in the United States.
He was supposed to have carried on his education there, but a few years later we heard about the fight that left a man dead, and his imprisonment for manslaughter.
And, without meaning to, we wrote him off. It seemed easier not to think about him. We didn't visit, we didn't write. We left him to fend for himself in a brutal and unforgiving environment we doubted he could survive, physically or emotionally.
But then, last year, he came home, after nearly a decade in American prisons. One day he was in a Californian prison, the next day he was put on a flight to Auckland, a free man with nothing except an extended family he hadn't seen in well over a decade.
He had turned into a tall, physically imposing man who was seemingly extraordinarily well adjusted for someone who'd spent a third of his life in a prison - wiser and more worldly in some ways, naive and vulnerable in others. He was determined never to return to jail.
We assuaged our guilt by making sure he had clothes, a roof over his head, and money to tide him over till he could find work. Eventually, that meant a move out of Auckland to live with his dad, who got him a good job in the same company, which made him more fortunate than many of the 9000 prisoners released in New Zealand every year.
But it was clear that while he'd become adept at surviving prison life, he had no idea how to cope with freedom. In prison, the choices were simple, predictable. Only the toughest, the strongest, the smartest survive.
But survival on the outside is hard, too. The real world is more unpredictable than prison, the rules less clearly defined, and the hazards of too much freedom and temptation not as easily detected. He has needed time to learn to be free again and how to make the right choices, to be watched and guided closely, and yet not so he feels shackled.
Which, I fear, is not what Bailey Kurariki will get when he is released on parole next month, a few months shy of his September release date.
Already under intense media scrutiny, he will be watched too closely, controlled too tightly. His unusually stringent parole conditions include an electronic anklet and a 24-hour curfew preventing him from leaving his house without permission.
So Kurariki, 18, will not be learning how to be free, to adjust to life outside prison while under the watchful eye of the Probation Service, but merely changing one prison for another while he's on parole. Which seems to defeat the aim of parole to help people like him make the "transition from prison to the community".
Will he get a fair chance to turn his life around? Does he even deserve a chance?
In September 2001, Kurariki, then 12, was the youngest of seven teenagers involved in the killing of Michael Choy, a pizza delivery worker who was lured into an alleyway and beaten with a baseball bat. Kurariki was the lookout who gave the signal for the attack.
Two of the group, aged 16 and 17, were convicted of Mr Choy's murder and jailedfor life. Kurariki was one of four convicted of manslaughter; he was given seven years.
There's no doubt he was complicit and his prison term reflected this. But descriptions of him as a "baby-faced killer" make him out as something he's not.
Compare him with the 10-year-old killers of James Bulger, a 2-year-old toddler who was bashed to death in 1993 after being lured from a shopping mall in Liverpool. Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were tried as adults for the senseless murder and given life imprisonment.
But in 2001, after only eight years, they were released on parole, aged 18. They were given new identities and addresses, and a lifetime media ban.
Despite public protest and threats, both have been left alone. Of course, James Bulger's mother feels differently. Her life irrevocably damaged, she cannot see her son's killers as other than evil. She cannot forgive.
It is hard not to feel for her unimaginable pain, as it is hard not to feel for Michael Choy's mother, Rita Croskery.
I don't know Bailey Kurariki, but it's possible to understand if not excuse the path leading him to that fatal alleyway in 2001. He was 12. He's spent most of his teenage years locked up.
It is said Kurariki is "very unlikely to reoffend". But there are no guarantees. He will need continuing support from people who care - and understanding from everyone else.
We know what he looks like, even where he's likely to live. But he's served his sentence. We should now leave him alone to try to make something of his life.
Tapu. Misa@gmail.com
