The woman who was the primary caregiver of 2-year-old Arapera Fia told jurors today she continues to have blank spots in her memory of the days leading up to the toddler’s violent death.
“I just blocked the whole thing out,” the witness, whose name is suppressed, said of the self-described amnesia during hours of contentious cross-examination today. “I can’t remember a lot of things [from] that period of time. I’ve just closed myself down from it.
“... It’s not a decision. It’s the trauma.”
The woman had been set to go to trial in the High Court at Auckland this month for manslaughter alongside her former on-again-off-again boyfriend Tyson Brown, who is accused of the child’s murder. She instead pleaded guilty to manslaughter - for her role in failing to protect the child - days before the trial began.
So instead of a co-defendant of Brown’s, she is now testifying against him while awaiting her own sentencing.
Brown’s lawyer, Lester Cordwell, has contended from the outset of the trial last week that the primary caregiver was the person responsible for Arapera’s fatal injuries. The child arrived at Starship hospital on October 31, 2021, covered in bruises, with a spinal injury and having suffered blunt force trauma to the head. She died hours later.
The woman spent most of yesterday questioned by prosecutor Luke Radich, sometimes crying as he showed her photos of the child’s injuries. She wept again today as the defence showed her a photo of bruising that was taken covertly by her concerned flatmate five days before the child’s death.
She insisted that she didn’t remember seeing the distinct bruises across the toddler’s torso despite bathing Arapera nearly every day.
“How do you know if you caused those bruises on the 26th if you have unintentionally blocked that out?” Cordwell asked.
“I know I did not hit her hard enough to make marks,” the woman responded.
Cordwell responded: “Because you blocked them out, you can’t say one way or the other whether you caused them ... Aren’t you saying, ‘I hope I didn’t cause them’?”
She insisted the lawyer was wrong.
“Just because I blocked things out doesn’t mean I don’t know that I didn’t do it,” she said.
Cordwell pointed out repeatedly during his questioning that 2021 had been a stressful year for the witness, and she agreed. There was the breakdown of a long-term relationship at the start of the year followed by her cutting off contact with a large portion of her extended family.
Then in August 2021, Auckland’s extended Covid-19 lockdown began, resulting in the loss of childcare. Brown tested positive for Covid-19 on October 28 and the entire household had to isolate. The woman tested positive on October 31, the day the child is believed to have received her fatal injuries. Adding to the stress, the woman agreed, was that the food parcel she had received after her positive test wasn’t enough to cover the necessities.
“You started toilet training during lockdown. That wouldn’t have been easy,” Cordwell said, to which the woman agreed. “Did you use swats and slaps to train her?”
“I did sometimes,” she responded, reiterating that she never smacked the child hard enough to leave a mark.
Cordwell also suggested during his questioning that she was disinterested in the child - more “obsessed” with making videos for social media app TikTok.
He pointed out that her testimony was often in direct contradiction of at least five witnesses, including one of her flatmates, two police officers and a health worker who identified the woman in a lineup as someone who had treated the child so roughly it had stuck in her mind for months.
In each instance, the woman said the other witnesses were wrong.
Eventually, Cordwell put his theory to the witness more directly. Moments after learning she had tested positive for Covid, the woman went into Arapera’s bedroom and found her crying.
“When she didn’t settle ... did you pick her up and throw her down and then throw her against the wall ... because you were stressed out that day?” he asked. “You were at wits end, weren’t you?”
The woman said she had been stressed that day but nothing else of what Brown’s lawyer said was true.
“You threw her around and then she stopped crying, didn’t you?” Cordwell asked.
“No, I didn’t,” she said.
Realising she had gone “seriously overboard”, she then called Brown into the room and planted in his mind that the child was reacting to having fallen off the slide, Cordwell suggested. She denied it.
“Is it possible you’ve blocked all of this out?” the defence lawyer asked.
“I blocked out seeing [Arapera] the way she was,” the woman said, insisting that the memory lapse was about the appearance of bruises only. “I remember not doing it.”
The woman said she was concerned over the following hours as the child napped. She acknowledged googling “how long can a baby be unconscious for” around 5.30pm but said she didn’t think the child was actually concussed. She was checking on Arapera every 10 minutes and tickling her feet to make sure she was responsive, she said.
Around 7.30pm, she said she noticed the child’s heart rate elevate. But it settled again after she sang a karakia to the toddler, she said. About 30 minutes later she would call 111, saying the child had just gone unconscious and stopped breathing.
Cordwell also played a recording from inside the woman’s MIQ room on November 4 in which she was on a call and said she had been viewing videos of the child.
“I just feel like punching you through this camera,” she said of the toddler. “You drove me crazy, man. I haven’t been able to have a rest.”
The woman said today she had no recollection of the conversation and so did not know the context of what she was recorded saying.
“When she was alive and acting like a little s*** - those are your words - did you feel like punching her?” the defence lawyer asked.
“No, I didn’t,” the woman said.
The woman acknowledged to Cordwell that she knew that giving evidence against Brown may be taken into account when she is later sentenced for manslaughter. She also acknowledged having recently given birth and being afraid she might lose that child if sent to prison.
But that’s not why she chose to co-operate with prosecutors and police at the last minute, and it’s not why she told jurors that Brown had previously admitted to shaking the child on the day she was fatally injured, she insisted.
“It was my chance to speak,” she said. “My evidence has nothing to do with my sentencing at all. I wanted to do this on my own.”
The witness is expected to continue testifying for a third day when the trial continues tomorrow before Justice David Johnstone.
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