Weymouth toddler's death: Two defendants plead not guilty through their lawyers. Video / Hayden Woodward
Unusual, symmetrical abrasions on both of 2-year-old Arapera Fia’s earlobes paired with an unusual bruise on her neck suggest she might have been choked in the final hours of her life, a medical expert has told jurors in the murder trial of Tyson Brown.
One of the Google searches that Brown was found to have conducted on his phone at 6.47pm on October 31, 2021 - just over an hour before emergency responders were called to the Weymouth, South Auckland property - was “how to wake up a baby after being choked”.
Paediatrician Dr Juliet Soper described the injuries today as “not something I would consider to be accidental” without some sort of detailed explanation such as a child getting caught up in a clothesline.
The injuries, she said, were in her opinion inflicted.
Soper was one of three medical experts who described the toddler’s numerous injuries in detail today as they gave evidence in the High Court at Auckland. They included fractured vertebrae and roughly 60 bruises and abrasions stretching from head to toe on the child. But it was blunt force trauma to the head that caused Arapera’s death, all three experts agreed.
First responders testified last week that the child’s primary caregiver, who has name suppression, and Brown both repeatedly told them that the child had fallen off her brightly coloured plastic slide - a small toy less than a metre high, intended for use by pre-schoolers.
But that scenario doesn’t make a lot of sense when trying to determine the cause of death, all three experts agreed.
“Fatal low-level falls just do not happen,” neuropathology professor Colin Smith told jurors as he testified via an audio-video feed from the United Kingdom.
“I can’t say it’s impossible but ... it’s not a reasonable explanation.”
Soper, the paediatrician, said it was also important to consider the other injuries when considering the whole picture even though they weren’t fatal.
“It wouldn’t cause 60 skin and soft-tissue injuries,” she said of a fall from a slide, explaining that even children who have been in auto accidents rarely have more than five or six bruises.
Brown’s lawyers have acknowledged that a tumble from the slide couldn’t have caused the child’s death.
But the child’s primary caregiver has insisted throughout her three days of testimony this week that the child started acting unusually drowsy that afternoon, soon after the pair saw the toddler fall from the slide.
The woman also testified that she had left the child alone with Brown for about 30 minutes soon after the alleged fall. He would confess to her the next morning that he had shaken the toddler after she struggled as he tried to dress her, the witness said.
Tyson Brown was charged with murder after the 2021 death of 2-year-old Arapera Fia. Photo / Supplied
Brown’s lawyer, Lester Cordwell, has suggested that it is the woman who lost her temper, throwing the child against a wall and then trying to pin it on Brown. She has repeatedly denied the theory.
Forensic pathologist Dr Kilak Kesha said today that it is highly unlikely Arapera would have died from being violently shaken.
“I’ve never seen it in a child over 1 year old,” he said of shaken baby syndrome.
“I’ve never heard of it happening in a child over 2 years old.”
While it is impossible to age the child’s many bruises, the abrasions and fractures hadn’t begun to heal so would have been caused within hours of her death, he surmised.
The trauma to her head was extensive enough that he couldn’t say which blow would have been the fatal one.
“There were multiple impacts that were coalescing all together,” he said, explaining that he “couldn’t tell one from the others”.
“It would have to be multiple impacts,” he said.
Kesha agreed with the defence that the spinal and head injuries might have been caused by someone throwing the child onto the ground and then throwing her against the wall over a short period of time.
Tyson Brown appears in the High Court at Auckland at the start of his murder trial. He is accused of having fatally beaten 2-year-old Arapera Fia in her Weymouth, South Auckland home. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Lawyers also questioned the child’s primary caregiver for a third consecutive day. The woman had been set to go to trial alongside Brown but instead testified against him, after pleading guilty just days before the trial began, to manslaughter - reflecting her failure to protect the child.
The defence combed over multiple text messages between her and Brown that were sent about two weeks after Arapera’s death. In them, they both professed love for each other.
“You made me feel the love no one has ever made me feel!” the woman wrote in one text. “Every time I seen you I would get tingly. You made me nervous even when I knew I didn’t have to be”.
The defence suggested the exchange seemed strange if she thought Brown had killed the girl by shaking her. The woman said she had been confused.
“At the time I didn’t understand what had happened and who done it, so I couldn’t pinpoint anyone,” she said.
“I’m sorry but I have to say what I know,” the woman wrote to Brown at another point in the text exchange - referring, she said, to telling police about the shaken baby disclosure.
