There were 38 people in courtroom 11 at the High Court of Auckland yesterday morning. They were all there for the sentencing of Tyson Brown, 23, found guilty of murdering - as in severely beating, fracturing her spine, fracturing her skull - 2-year-old Arapera Fia.
No one could comprehend the violence. No one could get their heads around it. Justice David Johnstone delivered a fairly routine sentence until something extraordinary happened: he departed from his notes, looked over at Brown and improvised, felt moved to say something in the heat of the moment.
In its own way, it was as strangled and angry as the things Arapera’s family shouted at Brown’s family when they left the courtroom. Mainly they were shouting that Brown should have been given a longer sentence.
Justice Johnstone gave him life or 15 years without parole; there were shouts for 17 years, for 20 years, for life as in life.
Malcolm Fia, Arapera’s father, wanted some kind of immediate justice and had to be held back. A woman pulled at his arm; a little boy flung himself around his waist. Fia kept going, a big man moving up the field, shouting at Brown’s family. Security intervened. Outside the High Court, Fia put on a red bucket hat, and paced up and down, in circles, too boiling to rest. He wore a white T-shirt of Tupac bearing the legend “Only God Can Judge Me”.
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
Justice Johnstone might take exception to that. It was his job to judge Brown. He did so in unusual ways. At sentencing, it’s customary for the defence to open proceedings. But the judge bade Lester Cordwell, Brown’s lawyer, to sit down. He preferred to hear from Arapera’s family first. He invited Malcolm Fia to speak.
Media were given a copy of his victim impact report. It was an intense read. One paragraph gave commas the day off, and it read like a man talking in his sleep, or his nightmare, unable to stop or pause, compelled to get it all out: “I had to dress Arapera, it took me 10 mins just to enter the room, standing at the door crying, I couldn’t go in, just seeing her lying there, it was just so hard to be honest when I finally went in, the first thing I noticed was all the markings and bruises on her face, it made me even angrier, it really got to me, seeing her ears like they were burnt from the earlobes to the top of her ears.”
It was just as intense to hear it said out loud. Fia wept and broke down, but he kept on going. On his way back to his seat, he looked across the court at Brown and stared at him.
He was looking at a slender man one year younger than him, dressed as though for a night on the town. He wore a white shirt and a long black waist-length coat. His long hair fell down over the shoulders. He was neatly bearded and tied his hair in a topknot. Handsome guy, very stylish; a jury ruled that on October 31, in a house in Weymouth, South Auckland, he beat a child to death.
“It was not a prolonged attack,” said his lawyer Cordwell. “This was an attack resulting from a lack of self-control, from snapping, from a loss of temper.” To which Crown prosecutor Luke Radich responded: “It was not an instance of snapping.” He asked: “How long is a piece of string?” He measured it: “It was not hours but more likely minutes than seconds.” Seconds is snapping. Hours is insane, also exhausting. Minutes to beat a child to death is prolonged.
But Cordwell’s remarks, even if indirectly, could be taken as the first acknowledgement that Brown was responsible.
At the trial, Brown had pleaded not guilty; Cordwell, over three days in cross-examination, accused Arapera’s caregiver of the murder. Nothing was said about that at sentencing. Neither was there any outright admission of guilt or remorse. Justice Johnstone: “That you have said you are sorry for your part in this best captures your mindset. You do not accept you killed her yourself. You should.”
The judge threw around words you expect in the sentencing of a man beating a child to death - “brutality”, and “callousness”. He gave a brief narrative, also as entirely expected, of the events leading up to a man beating a child to death. But then he crossed over from his prepared judgment into what was going on in courtroom 11. He mentioned that Brown had pretended to paramedics that he was unaware of Arapera’s injuries. He sometimes cast a glance at Brown during his judgment; this was one of those times, but this time he kept his eyes on him.
Arapera Fia was beaten to death in 2021, aged 2. Her killer was sentenced to 15 years in jail.
”Do not shake your head,” he said. The courtroom froze. He continued to stare at him. Justice Johnstone has good cheekbones and an angular face; he pointed it at Brown like an arrow. ”It will not serve you well,” he said.
The judge had snapped. He had had enough of Brown. Just about everyone in courtroom 11 had too, with the exception of his family, who wept at sentencing. “Love ya, babe,” a woman called out when he has led away for the next 15 years of his life.
The courtroom emptied. The ghost of the 39th and most important person remained: Arapera Fia, 2 years old, a child beaten to death. Her plastic slide had been brought into court during the trial. It was placed in front of the room. It was so small, it only had three steps; Arapera was just a baby. “Everyone loved her,” said her father.
