From darkness to light
A former gang wife and mother of a toddler who was tortured and beaten to death, Nicola Dally-Paki’s life has been one of darkness and tragedy. But, as Tony Wall reports, she has used the memory of her son, Moko, to find the light, and is now helping others do the same.
Nicola Dally-Paki used to have a shrine in her house to her son, Moko Rangitoheriri, which she would use to connect with him.
It’s gone now, replaced by pictures and sketches of the boy on her living room wall.
She wants Moko to know about the good things she’s doing in his name – studying, helping victims of domestic violence, advocating for people struggling to keep their tenancies – so he’ll know ‘‘mama did this for me’’.
Moko’s name is forever etched in New Zealand’s child abuse hall of shame – the 3-year-old beaten and tortured by a couple who were supposed to look after him.
Dally-Paki (Ngā puhi, Ngā ti Tū wharetoa, Ngā ti Maniapoto) is a complicated character, forged by her experiences of gang life, domestic violence and unimaginable loss.
A staunch wahine Mā ori fluent in te reo, she can be combative and argumentative, but there’s also a vulnerability about her.
She is fiercely protective of her whā nau and Moko’s legacy, going so far as to trademark his name because she was tired of people using it without permission for their own purposes.
She doesn’t pretend she’s an angel, but is determined to better herself to set an example for her surviving two children, who were taken from her by the state after Moko’s death.
Dally-Paki, 33, is the lead community worker on a contract the Manukau Urban Mā ori Authority (MUMA) holds with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development to help people struggling to maintain tenancies.
The job puts her in contact with some of society’s most vulnerable, including those affected by the recent spate of gang shootings in Auckland.
In 2020, Dally-Paki testified at the Waitangi Tribunal’s urgent inquiry into Oranga Tamariki, highlighting the failings coroner Wallace Bain found its predecessor agency, Child, Youth and Family (CYF), made in the leadup to Moko’s death.
She told the tribunal she took every opportunity she could to share Moko’s story. ‘‘His [killing] must bring about positive and effective change so no mother or whā nau suffers and carries the mamae (pain) or mokemoke (loneliness) that I live with every day.’’
Stuff spoke to Dally-Paki at her home in east Auckland shortly after it was revealed there were alleged Oranga Tamariki failings in another child murder case, that of Bay of Plenty 5-year-old Malachi Subecz, also killed by his caregiver.
She can barely bring herself to read articles about such cases. ‘‘It’s just like a broken record, the same thing, just a new name. It [Oranga Tamariki] is like a crack-head that doesn’t want to change their life.
‘‘They tell everybody ‘leave your violent relationship, or you’re gonna lose your kids’. But we have a toxic relationship with Oranga Tamariki, and we’re not allowed to leave it.’’
A twin, Dally-Paki is Mā ori on the side of her father, Howard Paki, and mother, Caroline Dally, while her maternal grandfather was Spanish-Italian.
Howard Paki was a former traffic cop who later started his own business as a drain layer. When Nicola was just 6, he died after contracting meningitis.
The family moved around, following Caroline Dally’s job as a business school manager. Dally-Paki enrolled at Te Wharekura o Rakaumangamanga in Huntly and would take her school work on the road as her mother delivered business programmes around the country.
When she was 12, the family moved to Australia’s Gold Coast. A few years later, Dally-Paki moved to Sydney, living with an aunt in the south-western suburb of Hammondville and attending Holsworthy High School, populated mainly by kids from army families.
‘‘I did well there. I was 84% in business and commerce and started year 12 paralegal studies.’’
At 16, she became engaged to a young Egyptian man from a wealthy Coptic Orthodox family. It was arranged between her mother, a Catholic, and her fiance’s family that they would marry when she turned 18.
But in 2005, simmering tensions between youths of Middle Eastern descent and white Australians erupted into full-blown race riots centred around Cronulla beach.
‘‘Everybody was smashing everybody, pretty much,’’ Dally-Paki says.
The violence spilled into her corner of Sydney – a shooting in a relative’s street was the final straw – and it was decided that she would return to New Zealand until things settled down. She never returned to Australia.
She landed in Hamilton, where, to her mother’s horror, she got her tongue pierced.
‘‘She said I needed to go to Tokoroa, to have a break there. So that’s how I ended up down there, with [her children’s father’s] mum. She used to babysit us when we were little.’’
Her future husband wasn’t in a gang at the time, but
unbeknown to her, was soon to join Mangu Kaha Black Power.
Dally-Paki did a business administration course and took a position as a kaiawhina (helper) at a kohanga reo. Later, she was asked to be principal relief at a school, Te Kura Kaupapa Mā ori o Te Hiringa.
Her teaching career went on hold when she became pregnant at 19. There was pressure from her Catholic family to marry, and she says that’s the only reason for her marriage to the man who would end up becoming a senior gang member and subjecting her to violence.
But gang life wasn’t all bad, she says. ‘‘We used to have what we called whā nau days on Sundays . . and we’d have our barbecues, games for our kids, Christmas and Halloween we’d have together.’’
Moko entered this environment as the third of the couple’s children, born on October 15, 2011. She admits she spoiled him. ‘‘He’s not this innocent, pretty face that they all portrayed him to be – he was really naughty,’’ she laughs.
One time, he somehow managed to drive his mother’s van into the side of their house.
When his father’s gang prospects visited, he’d taunt them, later telling his mum they were ‘‘pussies’’. Another time, the tip of Moko’s finger was severed when a sibling accidentally slammed a door on it. ‘‘I had to . . . put it on ice and then drive him to [hospital]. They sewed it back on. He was always in the wars, that kid.’’
She insists her children were some of the ‘‘lucky ones’’ because she was always able to provide for them and hid the worst aspects of gang life.
She doesn’t want to go into detail about the domestic violence she suffered, but says she fought back on occasions.
‘‘I started [thinking] ‘I don’t want to live this life any more’. I went and got a protection order, got day-to-day care [of the children].’’
She moved to Papakura, in South Auckland, in 2015. One day, Moko’s older brother fell out of a tree, injuring his leg, an incident that set in motion the tragic events that followed.
Dally-Paki says staff at Middlemore Hospital missed a hairline fracture in her son’s tibia, sending him home.
By the time he was readmitted, he’d developed the bone infection chronic osteomyelitis and was later found to have septicemia, or blood poisoning.
He was transferred to Starship, where his condition was serious. Dally-Paki needed somewhere to stay close by, but says she was turned away from Ronald McDonald House and women’s refuge because of her gang affiliations.
She reached out to Tania Shailer, who’d worked with her as a carer at the kohanga reo in Tokoroa and who was living in Taupō , asking if she could take the children until she found something stable in Auckland.
(The week Moko died, DallyPaki says, she was due to move into an apartment in Parnell.)
Dally-Paki says she thought Shailer would be a good carer because of her kohanga experience.
She didn’t know much about Shailer’s partner, David Haerewa, who seemed ‘‘normal’’. Almost 20 years older than Shailer, he in fact had a long criminal history and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Her biggest regret is not looking more deeply into the couple’s situation. ‘‘I didn’t know it was that bad, I didn’t look into it, I should have, big time. I put my children in danger.’’
The well-documented atrocities that Shailer and Haerewa inflicted on Moko sent thousands of New Zealanders to the streets, marching against child abuse.
The pair were initially charged with murder, but reached a plea bargain deal with the Crown, pleading guilty to manslaughter before being jailed for 17 years.
The downgrade in charge still angers Dally-Paki. ‘‘It should have been murder.’’
Ironically, Shailer herself had contacted CYF before Moko’s death, saying she had concerns about his welfare with DallyPaki because of her gang connections. (Oranga Tamariki admits staff failed to visit Moko after this report of concern.)
‘‘She tried to frame me,’’ Dally-Paki says. ‘‘ The police had me under interrogation, saying I’d dropped Moko off half dead.’’
That was easily disproved, she says.
She’s only recently been able to look at the messages she shared with Shailer over Facebook Messenger while her children were with Shailer.
‘‘I was stupid, dumb, to not see any of the signs. Where I am [working], you have to know the signs when you’re on the coalface, know the red flags.’’
The red flag with Shailer was that she was always asking for money. ‘‘[She said] ‘Moko doesn’t want to talk today, they’re getting ready to go to a party, so can you send the money’.
‘‘But he always wanted to talk to me. How come I didn’t see it? I just thought, ‘maybe they’re settled’. I didn’t want to unsettle them.’’
While Moko was on life support in Taupō Hospital, noone got in touch with Dally-Paki to let her know. She fought for several years to get hold of his hospital records, which showed Shailer was listed as Moko’s next of kin, and he was erroneously described as being in CYF care.
The upshot was that she couldn’t be there when his life support was turned off; Moko died without his whā nau around him. Dally-Paki laid a formal complaint and the health and disability commissioner is investigating the hospital’s actions.
In 2019, the Independent Police Conduct Authority wrote to Dally-Paki that police had agreed to apologise to her for not letting her know that Moko was in hospital.
After Moko’s death, Dally-Paki’s life was a whirlwind of family and criminal court hearings, the coroner’s inquest and the occasional media appearance.
She got Moko’s name tattooed in Roman numerals around her neck, along with a Catholic cross for her late nan. A social worker told her the family court judge ‘‘will take one look at that and think it’s gang-related’’.
She was so angered by the comment that she had the words ‘‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’’ tattooed on her cheek in Spanish, knowing she was about to appear in a TV interview and the worker would see it.
‘‘I get that it was petty of me to do. But that social worker should not have discriminated against me and Moko’s name around my neck.’’
Despite that, she is having that particular tattoo removed by laser surgery, and has since added moko kauae to her chin and forehead.
‘‘It should have been murder.’’ Nicola Dally-Paki on the downgrade of the charge against Moko’s killers to manslaughter
In 2016, she got a job as an administrator in MUMA’s whā nau ora division, gaining a diploma in Whā nau Ora Mā ori Social Services from Wai-Tech in 2018, then spent a year in operation support at MUMA’s Radio Waatea.
In 2019, she began studying law at the Auckland University of Technology, before Covid interrupted her study and she joined the ‘‘front line’’ of social services in South Auckland during the pandemic.
She’s also the chief executive of a charity, Justice for Moko’s Legacy, that has raised money for the likes of the Shine domestic violence organisation, and recently finished financial mentoring training.
Dally-Paki’s former lawyer, Arama Ngapo-Lipscombe, says she has nothing but respect for what she’s done to help others in the years since Moko’s death, especially around domestic violence.
‘‘I think she’s an extraordinary young woman who’s overcome considerable hardships in her life. She took one of the most horrific events that anyone could possibly go through and has used it as a platform to advocate for women to find a better life for themselves.’’
Ellyce McLeod, a producer at Waatea News who became close friends with Dally-Paki when the latter previously worked at the radio station, says her friend is inspirational.
‘‘She’s one of the strongest women that I know. It’s just remarkable the experiences she’s gone through and how she’s overcome everything and is able to still be her happy, bubbly self.’’
Dally-Paki says she is now focused on her two children. ‘‘They’re in a dark space about what happened with their brother, that’s completely understandable,’’ she says.
‘‘I have to find some peace with it to be able to parent these kids, so they don’t grow up and get out of control and do things they’ll regret.’’
And Moko is never far away. ‘‘He’s gone, but he’s still serving his purpose, with everything that we do in the community, with his story, the Waitangi Tribunal, with his legacy.’’