Weymouth toddler's death: Two defendants plead not guilty through their lawyers. Video / Hayden Woodward
Multiple jurors wept today as an Auckland man was found guilty of beating to death a 2-year-old girl who was found by paramedics not breathing, covered from head-to-toe in bruises and with too many head injuries to count.
Tyson Brown, 22, was charged with murder two weeks after toddler Arapera Moana Aroha Fia was rushed to Starship Hospital from her Weymouth home on the evening of October 31, 2021. She was unresponsive upon arrival and pronounced dead hours later, just after midnight the next day.
Brown had been in an on-again-off-again relationship with the child’s primary caregiver, who continues to have name suppression as she awaits her own sentencing for manslaughter.
Multiple members of the child’s extended family were in the High Court at Auckland today as the jury foreperson announced the group’s verdict after two and a half hours of deliberations. The child’s biological father, who sat silently in the gallery for much of Brown’s trial, held his head down into his lap as a supporter put her hand on his knee.
Justice David Johnstone, who oversaw the two-week trial, set a sentencing date for May.
Tyson Brown was charged with murder after the 2021 death of 2-year-old Arapera Fia.
“Go to f***ing hell,” a woman in the gallery said as Brown was led out of the courtroom to await sentencing. “Murderer!”
Brown declined to testify during the trial but his lawyers insisted that it was the child’s primary caregiver who “snapped” amid the stress of Auckland’s 2021 Covid-19 lockdown, inflicting the fatal head injuries within minutes of learning she had tested positive for the virus.
At the very least, lawyer Lester Cordwell argued, jurors should be unable to definitively say that it wasn’t the woman. The inverse of that, he said, is the group can’t find beyond a reasonable double that Brown did it.
The woman’s guilty plea, however, was for failing in her duty to protect the child - not for directly inflicting the injuries.
During three days in the witness box, the woman repeatedly insisted that it wasn’t she who injured the child. On the same morning as the child’s death, as she and Brown were sent to the same MIQ room, she said the defendant told her that he had shaken Arapera out of frustration before paramedics arrived.
It is incredibly rare for a child over the age of 2 to die as the result of being shaken, Cordwell noted during his closing address last week.
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
But prosecutor Luke Radich characterised the alleged admission as a partial confession - an inadequate explanation of the child’s injuries intended by Brown to win the caregiver’s confidence without admitting the full extent of his violence against the child.
Radich also pointed to testimony from a former friend of Brown’s who described a conversation a month before Arapera’s death in which he recalled the defendant demonstrating a forceful MMA-style kick while bragging about how he disciplined the child.
A neighbour recalled often hearing a male yelling at a child at the South Auckland property and a couple who lived in a sleepout on the same property as Arapera testified that they also would hear Brown yelling accompanied by banging noises and the child crying. On the day of Arapera’s death, the couple referred to Brown’s banging repeatedly in text messages.
Prosecutors also noted Brown’s Google searches in the hours leading up to paramedics’ arrival, including “how to wake someone up from being knocked out”, “how to wake up a baby after being knocked out” and “how to wake up a baby after being choked”.
But the defence characterised Brown as a talker with a loud voice that could be misinterpreted as yelling.
The MMA kicks could have been a joke and Brown’s Google searches, Cordwell argued, could have been influenced by the child’s caregiver.
He noted that at a Covid testing station just days before Arapera’s death a healthcare worker described the caregiver throwing the toddler into the back seat like a rugby ball and driving off without fastening her car seat restraints. It shows she had a capacity for violence and losing her temper, he argued.
Prosecutors acknowledged the woman was not very likeable and that her testimony appeared to minimise her role as an inattentive, non-empathetic caregiver. But even setting all of her testimony aside, there was enough evidence from other witnesses to find Brown guilty of murder, they said.
The woman is set to be sentenced for her manslaughter charge at the same time as Brown’s sentencing for murder.
At the conclusion of the trial, Malcolm Fia, the child’s father, described the verdict as bittersweet even though it was what he had prayed for.
“I have come to understand and learn that the death of my beautiful daughter Arapera was done in an inhumane way,” he said. “It’s too late to do anything - she’s gone now and resting in heaven. The anguish I feel and pain, I wish this not on anyone even my worst enemy.
“I didn’t get a chance to see her go off to her high school years, see her dress up in her formal dress and ... walk her down the aisle on her wedding day. So many thoughts are running through my head, and some, I pray to the man above to help me get through it.”
He thanked police, lawyers and whānau from overseas and throughout New Zealand in helping him confront his pain. While justice was served with the guilty verdict, it won’t bring his daughter back, he said.
“As painful as it is to think of her last moments in her life, I want to celebrate her always and be her voice,” he said. “I hope the death of my precious princess will help other families and friends stuck in an abusive and unhealthy environment to seek help. It’s never too late to ask for help.
“My daughter didn’t deserve to leave this cruel world like this. My heart and my soul left the day I got the call she was gone. I love you, Arapera, in this life and the next.”
