Two-year-old Arapera Fia’s short life ended during Auckland’s longest lockdown. Craig Kapitan sat through her two-week murder trial.
By all accounts, the stress of Auckland’s Covid-19 lockdown had been bearing down for days on the household at Weymouth’s Gibbons St where a colourful little plastic slide stood in the front yard - and where neighbours would sometimes hear a man yelling at a child.
Tyson Brown was the first to test positive for the virus on October 28, 2021, his mood more surly than usual as the then 21-year-old was shunned by his family, told to instead isolate at the home of his on-again-off-again partner - and the 2-year-old girl in her care - where he spent much of his time anyway.
The tension would continue to mount as the child’s primary caregiver, who cannot yet be named by court order, also got tested for the virus alongside little Arapera Fia. The woman’s treatment of the toddler during the drive-through Covid test would leave such a sour taste in the administering health worker’s mouth that, out of thousands of patients, she would be able to identify the caregiver in a photo line-up months later.
Then sometime on the afternoon of October 31, it all came to a violent crescendo. Paramedics, police and firefighters rushed to the house to find Arapera not breathing - the child’s body covered in so many bruises, abrasions and internal injuries that it would later take medical experts minutes to read off only the ones that hadn’t been deadly.
The blunt-force head injuries that killed her were too numerous to count.
She was rushed to Starship Hospital where she would die just after midnight on November 1.
Someone in the house had snapped, and Arapera was dead as a result. But who inflicted the fatal blows: Brown or the child’s caregiver? That was the question jurors were forced to ponder, sometimes through tears, over the past two weeks as Brown went on trial for murder in the High Court at Auckland.
After three-and-a-half hours of deliberations, the group returned a guilty verdict this week. Many of them wept openly as they did so, a moment of catharsis after a trial that had taken a large emotional toll on everyone involved.
“Murderer!” a person in the gallery yelled as Brown was led away from the courtroom.
But what seemed abundantly clear from days of testimony was that neither of the adults had contributed to a nurturing home for Arapera in the wretched final days of her short life and the toddler became another victim of New Zealand’s horrific child abuse statistics.
The trial was initially supposed to see both of the adults who were with Apapera in the final hours of her life sitting next to each other in the dock.
The toddler’s primary caregiver, however, pleaded guilty at the last minute to manslaughter. It was an admission that she failed in her duty to protect the child but not that she inflicted the injuries herself.
With the woman suddenly free to testify, Brown’s lawyers pushed hard over her three days in the witness box to keep the trial focused on her even though she was no longer a co-defendant. Brown, meanwhile, declined to testify.
The woman recalled arriving at an MIQ facility - where she shared a room with Brown - on the same morning as Arapera’s death when her partner revealed to her that he had treated the child roughly. It occurred, he is alleged to have said, while trying to dress Arapera as the woman was on the phone with a healthcare worker learning of her positive Covid test.
“I should have told you it when it happened,” she recalled Brown saying. “She was tugging backwards and forwards with the clothes and she wouldn’t let me dress her. So I picked her up and I started shaking her: ‘Why the f*** are you not letting me put your clothes on?’”
Brown then repeated “I’m sorry” over and over again, the woman testified.
But the woman’s other testimony was often directly at odds with other witnesses. She denied being rough with the child herself at the Covid testing station and when confronted with photos and videos showing Arapera with multiple bruises in the days leading up to her death the woman said she didn’t recall them.
“I can’t remember a lot of things [from] that period of time,” she said during cross-examination. “I’ve just closed myself down from it.
“... It’s not a decision. It’s the trauma.”
Defence lawyer Lester Cordwell floated another theory: that the woman snapped immediately after learning of her positive Covid test - throwing the child onto the ground with enough force to fracture her spine in three places and then throwing the child against a wall.
Authorities, he argued, had jumped to conclusions assuming only Brown could have been capable of such violence.
It had been a stressful year for the woman, including a break-up with her previous long-term partner, estrangement from her family, loss of childcare amid lockdown, trying to toilet train the toddler and worries about having enough food as the household was forced to isolate, she acknowledged. She also was dealing with a partner who didn’t want to be isolating with her.
“It kinda wasn’t even his choice to come here, he wanted to stay at his but because he’s been around me more than his family they told him he had to come here zzz,” the woman texted a friend hours before paramedics arrived. “I was having a heart attack when they were saying that cause I knew it wasn’t gonna be rainbows & butterflies.”
She confided to the same friend hours later: “It feels like it’s all my fault. My fault he has Covid. My fault he has to stay here. My fault he has to put up with [Arapera]. My fault my fault my fault.”
Videos from social media app TikTok already suggested the woman was emotionally detached from the child, treating Arapera as a forgotten extra in the background, Cordwell said. The woman’s test result, he argued, was the final straw.
He also suggested the woman had a history of injuring the child and was also responsible for the non-fatal bruises that she insisted she couldn’t remember.
“I know I did not hit her hard enough to make marks,” the woman testified.
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.
At the very least, the defence argued, jurors should be unable to definitively say that it wasn’t the woman who caused Arapera’s death. The inverse of that, Cordwell said, is that jurors can’t find beyond a reasonable doubt that Brown did it.
At the outset of the trial and during his closing address, Crown prosecutor Luke Radich acknowledged that the woman might not be a very likeable or even a trustworthy witness.
She may have minimised her role as an inattentive, non-empathetic caregiver. But the case doesn’t hinge on her being a truthful witness, he said, pointing to testimony from others.
Much of the most damning evidence, he said, was in Brown’s own words.
He pointed to testimony from a former mate of Brown’s who shared the defendant’s love of creating rap verses. The friend described a conversation less than two months prior to Arapera’s death in which he recalled the defendant demonstrating a forceful MMA-style kick while bragging about how he disciplined the child.
Five days after the child’s death, the friend received a call from Brown, who was sobbing. Neither man knew it at the time, but police had obtained a warrant to monitor Brown’s calls and were listening in.
In the conversations that followed, Brown suggested the child might have died from Covid-19, a fall from her slide or that she was fatally injured by paramedics after she was taken from the home.
“... Straight up, she was alive with us and, s*** bro, but they’re doing this,” Brown said. “I don’t know why, bro ... But bro, we did not beat her to the f***ing point where she died. No s*** like that happened, bro.”
During two separate calls, the friend reminded Brown of a previous conversation about “booting around” the child.
“It’s not like that, bro,” the defendant responded the first time. “... I don’t do that to f***ing little kids.”
The friend added during the later call, after he had lost confidence that Brown was telling him the truth: “Do you remember that night when you told me that you used to give her the boot? Do you remember that night?”
“Yeah, bro, I do, I do,” Brown responded, beginning to say more then trailing off with a long pause.
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”.
The child’s caregiver was also conducting Google searches, including “what happens if a baby’s lip has ripped from the inside?” and “how long can a baby be concussed for?”
Two weeks after Arapera’s death, Brown and the caregiver were released from MIQ but had not yet been arrested. They began exchanging text messages professing their love for each other.
“You made me feel the love no one has ever made me feel!” the primary caregiver typed. “Every time I seen you I would get tingly. You made me feel nervous even when I knew I didn’t have to be.”
But the woman also described the agony of losing Arapera, and suspicion that Brown was finally professing his love for her only after the child had died.
“I never wanted for any of this to happen,” she wrote. “I never wanted to go through this pain that I’m going through, the suffering...”
Brown, prosecutors said, was emotionally manipulating the woman in the hours-long text flurry - still trying to get her on his side. The defence said he was simply trying to work out what had happened and it was the caregiver manipulating him.
At one point Brown responded: “I’m so sorry b I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry IM SORRY I just........ I’m just sorry baby I can’t even comprehend this b, this is all my fault and I’m sorry.”
The next day the caregiver started a new text conversation informing Brown of her intention to “speak my truth tomorrow” about the alleged MIQ confession.
“If you loved me you wouldn’t drag me through this with you,” she said. “You would tell them to leave me alone & tell the truth. For me and [Arapera].”
Brown responded by suggesting he would end his life.
“Please put things right first please,” the woman said. “Baby even if you go I will still have to suffer going through court, could still possibly get charged for it because you’re gone. My fkn heart is aching because I don’t want to feel this pain.”
He responded: “Am I supposed to say I killed her?”
“I don’t know what to say, how to feel, what to do,” she said. “...Nothing didn’t kill [Arapera], something did. Her head was hit too much and 1 last shock is what took [her].
“I don’t have the answers to any of this because it wasn’t me that did it...”
Brown insisted he didn’t kill the child either.
“You are the only one that can fix this all,” the woman later responded. “You are the only one that can take the pain away from everyone including your family.”
She added later: “I’m not going to say you killed her but I am going to say what you said you did because that’s all I know that could possibly be a reason. I still can’t forget that fact & I don’t know how you can b I don’t because I’m dying.”
Brown tried to convince her again that authorities were up to something suspicious and that the child wasn’t injured until after she left the home.
“I’m sorry not being good enough for you, I’m sorry for the times I hurt or got angry at baby, I’m sorry for the times I upset you or made you cry...” Brown said.
The next morning he added: “I didn’t hurt her to the point she would die b.”
The former couple will be placed in the same dock in May, when she is sentenced for manslaughter and he is sentenced for murder on the same day. Both crimes carry a maximum possible sentence of life imprisonment.
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.”
Police say the assault was not 'hate-motivated'.