Weymouth toddler's death: Two defendants plead not guilty through their lawyers. Video / Hayden Woodward
On the afternoon before 2-year-old Arapera Moana Aroha Fia would be pronounced dead at Starship hospital — the toddler’s body covered in bruises and having suffered fatal head trauma — Tyson Brown was looking up information on Google including “how to wake up a baby after being knocked out” and “how to wake up a baby after being choked”.
It would still be over an hour before paramedics were called to the child’s Weymouth, South Auckland home, jurors were told today as Brown’s murder trial began in the High Court at Auckland.
Arapera was pronounced dead just after midnight on November 1, 2021.
Brown, 22, had been living on and off with the child and the child’s primary caregiver, who continues to have interim name suppression. The former co-defendant had been set to go to trial alongside Brown this week for manslaughter, accused of having failed to adequately protect the 26-month-old.
But she instead pleaded guilty last week and will testify against him, Crown prosecutor Luke Radich told jurors today during his opening address. Jurors may find the woman’s involvement “distasteful and hard to reconcile with what we all think of the powerful instinct to protect one’s child”, but it was Brown who inflicted the fatal blow after weeks of physical abuse, Radich contended.
Two-year-old Arapera Fia was covered in bruises when someone inflicted fatal blunt-force trauma to her head.
The prosecutor spent over a minute reading aloud each of the 37 areas of bruising found on Arapera’s body at the time of her death, including both eyes, both sides of her face, her neck, abdomen, buttocks and arms. She also suffered compression fractures to three vertebrae in her lower back, caused when someone is rapidly folded forward, their head collapsing into their lap.
“Arapera was, to state the obvious, in a very, very bad way,” he said, adding that her blood was found in various spots throughout the home.
But the cause of death, he said, was blunt force head injuries causing a brain bleed.
While authorities may never know “precisely what Tyson Brown did to Arapera behind those closed doors”, conversations with others before and after the child’s death suggest he knew he was to blame, prosecutors said.
“I’m so sorry babe,” he is alleged to have texted the co-defendant after the child’s death, repeating that he was sorry 10 times. “I can’t even comprehend this, baby. This is all my fault and I’m sorry.”
Police obtained a warrant to monitor calls and messages between the couple. At one point, he is alleged to have messaged her: “Baby, I hope you know if I did that if I did hurt her it wasn’t to the point where she died ...”
Prosecutors said they intend to call to the witness box a friend of Brown’s who said he was having drinks with the defendant weeks before Arapera’s death when the defendant admitted to kicking the child whenever she “acted up”. Brown then twice demonstrated to the friend forceful shin kicks, a move described as being used in mixed-martial arts combat, Radich told jurors.
The child’s caregiver is expected to testify that while the two were isolating together at an MIQ facility shortly after the death, Brown acknowledged having shaken the child.
Murder defendant Tyson Brown appears in the High Court at Auckland, accused of having fatally beaten 2-year-old Arapera Fia in her Weymouth, South Auckland, home in October 2021. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Defence lawyer Lester Cordwell acknowledged during his own opening statement that it will be difficult if not impossible for jurors to see and hear the evidence without outrage.
“We are all entitled to be angry about what happened here,” he said, adding that asking jurors to disregard those “natural feelings that define us as human” would make about as much sense as asking them to take a break from breathing. “There’s going to be some evidence that you won’t ever unsee ... You’re just going to have to accept that.”
But it is the former co-defendant, the child’s caregiver, who inflicted the fatal injuries rather than his client, he alleged.
It will be important that jurors acknowledge their feelings so that they can avoid evaluating the evidence through the warped prism of outrage, tears and grief, Cordwell added.
His client, he said, is “not the ogre that the Crown has painted him as so far”.
“The defendant says in the strongest possible terms Mr Brown did not inflict those injuries on Arapera,” Cordwell said. “Someone did, and the defence says that someone was [the caregiver].”
One of the first witnesses to testify in the trial today was Malcolm Pona Fia, the child’s father. A large man with a soft-spoken voice, he laughed as he recalled the volume of his daughter’s voice.
“She was real small, beautiful,” he said when asked to describe the child after her birth. “She was real loud too — real vocal.”
He described his daughter as “a very cheerful baby” who would “brighten everyone’s day just with her smile”.
He didn’t have custody of the child but would try to spend time with her when allowed by the primary caregiver, he said. He last saw Arapera about two weeks before her death and didn’t notice any injuries at the time, he said.
