Ben Sims
speaker
209 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 10 May
Ben Sims’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'm going to paraphrase something that Silas' father Ben said to me.
He said there's another world in which Silas walked into the Matakana Liquor Centre, tried to buy the bottle of Jägermeister and was declined, and then went off with his mates to the beach, had a swim, came home later.
That is an entirely plausible scenario.
He's out with his friends in the Walkworth, Matakana area, just near Auckland.
And as young people do, made a few bad decisions, but he was just a teenage boy.
He was served alcohol in three local businesses, and then he died at the wheel of his car.
For his parents and for me, the events there appear to stand for any small rural town area in New Zealand where it seems just too easy for young people to get alcohol served to them by businesses.
Well, that's the crux of it.
Silas was a tall, muscular, good-looking lad, but that's not the point.
Adults in charge of these businesses, adults serving in these businesses, have a legal duty to check IDs to make sure that they do not sell alcohol to underage people.
That's simple as it is.
They have to do that.
And not one of them did.
They all failed.
That's right.
And the result of this was that he was served with beers at two pubs.
and a 750 milliliter bottle of 35% proof Jagermeister from the Maticana Liquor Center.
Now this led to his death and it has led to the family, I think having to fight quite hard to get the legal outcomes that you would expect after something like this.
There were several, several pieces of security footage.
The first one, no, he didn't look drunk at all.
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