Just hours after 2-year-old Arapera Moana Aroha Fia was pronounced dead, her body covered in bruises and having suffered blunt-force trauma to the head, the child’s primary caregiver and the caregiver’s on-again-off-again partner, Tyson Brown, arrived together at a South Auckland MIQ facility.
It was there, in the early hours of November 1, 2021, that Brown confessed to having treated the toddler roughly just hours before she was hauled away in an ambulance, the caregiver told jurors today in the High Court at Auckland as she testified at Brown’s murder trial.
“He told me he needed to tell me something,” said the woman, who continues to have name suppression while awaiting sentencing for failing to protect the child.
“I should have told you it when it happened,” Brown is alleged to have said before explaining that he had been trying to dress the girl, as the caregiver was on the phone with a health worker in another room learning of her positive Covid-19 test.
“She was tugging backwards and forwards with the clothes and she wouldn’t let me dress her,” Brown allegedly explained. “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 said today.
“I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do,” the woman testified, lamenting that the child wouldn’t have died had she not taken the health worker’s call in another room. “I just wanted to die.”
Jurors were asked to leave for a short break as the woman, her head down in her lap, cried for several more minutes.
But the revelation came after hours of testimony in which the woman’s recollection of events in the days leading up to Arapera Fia’s death often directly contradicted testimony from other witnesses.
The caregiver was initially set to go to trial alongside Brown but she instead pleaded guilty to manslaughter earlier this month. Brown’s lawyers have suggested from the start of the trial that she is the person who is responsible for the toddler’s fatal injuries.
Prosecutor Luke Radich showed the woman a series of photos and video stills of the child in the days leading up to her death - several showing cuts and bruising.
“I don’t remember seeing them,” the caregiver said of a photo secretly taken by her concerned flatmate on October 26, 2021 - less than a week before the toddler’s death - of the child’s multiple bruises. “I know it sounds stupid of me to say that, but at the moment I don’t recall seeing them [bruises] on her.”
A cut seen on the child’s chin was caused by a fall in the shower and another cut to the side of the child’s eye happened when the child was waving around a large stick she had picked up, the woman said.
In a TikTok video in which the child was seen standing in the background as the woman chair-danced to a song, the prosecutor pointed out that the child seemed to have bruises on her face and legs.
“I don’t accept that she had bruises on her legs,” the woman replied. “She always wore shorts, so it could be a tan line - I’m not entirely sure. I don’t see anything on her face.”
When shown a TikTok video from three days later in which the child more clearly had bruising on her face, the woman said Arapera had fallen off her little plastic slide.
“I know it sounds ridiculous...” the witness conceded of the explanation.
One video in which the caregiver was seen smacking the child was because the child had turned on the woman’s new phone, she said.
“I would smack her on the hand or smack her on the bum with her clothes or nappy on,” she said of her physical discipline technique, describing the smacks as light. “She wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t physically be hurting her.”
The woman said earlier testimony from a Covid-19 testing station worker that she had treated the child poorly was incorrect. The worker said the caregiver had been indifferent as to whether the child received a more invasive nasal swab or an oral swab usually used for children. She denied throwing the child to the back of the car and leaving without buckling her into the car seat, as the worker had recalled.
On October 31, the last day that Arapera Fia was alive, the woman said that the toddler had been told to go outside and play after wetting herself. The child had been toilet training but, because they were isolating, didn’t have nappies, she explained.
Brown, she said, was swearing at the child, “telling her that she’s a f***ing little shit, that she shouldn’t be doing that and she knows right from wrong”.
A flatmate had earlier testified that the child had been standing outside the house lightly dressed for the cold weather with her head against the wall.
“We’ve found that instead of hitting her she can just sit there,” the caregiver texted back when the flatmate asked if Arapera was okay.
But the woman said the child had been dressed for the weather and was not being punished. Arapera had been allowed to go back inside the house whenever she wanted, she said.
While playing outside, the child had again fallen off her slide, this time hitting her head on the concrete driveway as the woman and Brown watched from the bedroom window, she said. She and Brown put the child in the shower to wash off the blood when she got the call from the health worker about her Covid test, she said.
After the call, she said, the child was drowsy and she checked on her every 10 minutes until paramedics were called hours later - repeatedly tickling her feet to make sure she was responsive.
Prosecutors and Brown’s lawyers have both agreed that the child’s fatal brain injury could not have been caused by falling off the miniature slide.
When asked why the slide wasn’t found by police anywhere near concrete, the woman said she had thrown it back on to the lawn after the fall. Prosecutors pointed out that police found brown, matted grass under the slide, suggesting it had been there for a while.
“I know this is the evidence and I know this is what police have given you, but I know what happened with the slide that day,” she responded, adding that several areas of the lawn looked brown.
“Can you help us understand that?” the prosecutor asked.
“No, I can’t,” she responded. “I just know where the slide was. She fell on the driveway.”
Prosecutors ended the woman’s direct examination today by playing a series of text messages and calls, covertly recorded by police after the child’s death, between her and Brown.
“I just hope you know that I never, ever, ever intended to do anything like this to you, to baby or to anyone that I love,” Brown told the woman during a late-night call two weeks after the toddler’s death, as it became clear to the pair that both would be charged with crimes. “I don’t expect you to have my back. I don’t expect you to do anything for me.
“Despite what happened, I think we both know that I do not deserve to rot away in a cell and have my life taken like that.”
On the calls and follow-up text messages, the two repeatedly professed their love for each other. Brown spoke slowly, often between sobs, as he ruminated on not being able to survive in prison.
“Baby, I hope you know... that if I did hurt her, it wasn’t to the point where she died or where she was to be killed from it,” Brown said.
The conversation came after the woman indicated to Brown she was going to tell authorities about him having admitted to shaking the child, she testified today.
“I don’t have the answers to any of this because it wasn’t me that did it,” the woman texted Brown.
“I don’t have the answers either, B,” Brown replied. “I promise you that you know just as much as I do.”
The woman responded: “I’m sorry, but I have to say what I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
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 can’t forget the fact and I don’t know how you can, B.”
But she never did make another statement to police until earlier this month, after pleading guilty, defence lawyer Lester Cordwell pointed out late this afternoon as he began his cross-examination.
The woman is expected to return to the witness box tomorrow as the trial continues before Justice David Johnstone.
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