Weymouth toddler murder trial: ‘Window of opportunity’ the central mystery of Arapera Fia’s death

It’s impossible to know the context of a short video played in the High Court of Auckland on Friday afternoon at the murder trial of Tyson Brown. He has been charged with killing Arapera Fia on November 1, 2021. She was aged 2 years and not quite one month, and the video was of her crying.

It was played by Crown prosecutor Luke Radich in his closing address. He had earlier reminded the jury they had seen or heard a lot of crying at the trial which began last Wednesday. The accused had cried, and so had Arapera’s primary caregiver, who has pleaded guilty to manslaughter for her role in failing to protect the child, and whose name and relationship to Arapera are suppressed. So many tears, some of them self-pitying. But this - the video, maybe only 20 or 30 unbearable seconds - was different. These were the tears of a kid who looked terrified and who was killed six days later, cause of death blunt force trauma to the head.

Radich identified what he described as the “window of opportunity” for Brown to give her the severe beating. Brown’s defence lawyer, Lester Cordwell, suggested another “window of opportunity” for the caregiver to administer the fatal attack. One or the other beat Arapera to death. Which one? This is the trial’s central mystery, its point. But even that question felt moot, insignificant, compared to the overwhelming sight of the helpless infant in the video.

Tyson Brown was charged with murder after the death of Arapera Fia.

It showed her head and shoulders. She looked at the screen. Her eyes were very large. No one said anything. Brown had taken the video on his phone and later deleted it, but it was recovered by police. He sat in court, a tall, slender man with his hair bound in a knot at the back of his head, and listened to Radich telling the jury, “The contusions on her head were too many to count. Probably we’ll never know how he did it - punching, throwing her against a wall, shaking her, or a combination of all of those.”

Radich drank an entire carafe of water in his closing; Cordwell swigged from a can of V. He told the jury that Brown had been painted as an ogre but said all that the evidence had established was that he sometimes yelled at the girl. “But his yelling is not a preamble to hitting. It’s a leap too far.” What was in Arapera’s large, wet eyes, when they looked at Brown recording her on the phone?

Radich questioned the decision to record a little girl weeping: “Who does that? Who does that?” Cordwell said the video had little or no worth, that it was only open for that most useless of things in a jury trial - speculation.

Tyson Brown appears in the High Court at Auckland. Photo / Jason Oxenham

There was an exhibit at the front of the courtroom. It was lower than the desks. Only the jury could see it: Anahera’s red, blue and yellow plastic slide, so small that it only had one step on the ladder. The crying girl in the video had played on this slide. She would have had a lot of fun on this slide in her brief life.

“It wasn’t a sustained beating over hours,” said Cordwell. “It wouldn’t have taken a long time.” He invited the jury to consider it took place in a seven-minute gap when the caregiver was off her phone that afternoon. Radich’s version: “Who’s the one who was not on the phone in the critical period? It’s Tyson. It’s Tyson. Who’s the one yelling, and banging around the house? It’s him.”

Justice David Johnstone will sum up on Monday, and ask the jury to consider its verdict on the murder of a girl aged 2 years and not quite one month. She was wearing cotton pyjamas in the video.