Warning: Distressing content

The Auckland man accused of having fatally beaten toddler Arapera Moana Aroha Fia had been seen mistreating the 2-year-old on multiple occasions, a line-up of witnesses said today as his murder trial continued.

Tyson Brown, 22, had been living on and off with Arapera and her primary caregiver when the girl was taken to Starship Hospital on October 31, 2021, with a life-threatening brain bleed and head-to-toe bruises. Doctors pronounced her dead hours later.

“I always seemed to hear him screaming at her,” a woman who lived in the same Weymouth, South Auckland neighbourhood told jurors today of the defendant and the child.

 “He’d tell her to shut the f*** up or be good at times or else she’ll get it - he’ll give her another hiding or something.”

The witness did not know Brown personally or Arapera’s primary caregiver, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter last week for failing in her duty to protect the child. But it was only the defendant - not a woman - who the neighbour ever saw yelling at the child, she said.

The former co-defendant continues to have name suppression.

Defence lawyer Lester Cordwell suggested during his opening statement yesterday in the High Court at Auckland that it was the co-defendant who caused Arapera’s injuries.

Crown prosecutor Luke Radich told jurors they may not like the woman, who was also seen to have treated the toddler poorly at times.

But it was Brown who inflicted the fatal injury, he insisted.

Tyson Brown was charged with murder after the 2021 death of 2-year-old Arapera Fia in Weymouth.

Also testifying today was Malu Sio - a friend of Arapera’s father, Malcolm Fia, who recalled a confrontation with Brown inside the Weymouth home less than a week before Arapera’s death.

He went into the child’s room that day and saw Brown changing her. He described the child as seeming to be “scared”,with bruises on her arms and face.

“I see him grab her pretty roughly, and I told him off about it and he didn’t like it,” Sio said, explaining that the defendant had grabbed the child’s arm.

“Just chill out,” he recalled telling the defendant.

“He didn’t say anything. He just stood there and stared at me.”

The primary caregiver then came in the room and said the bruises were because Arapera had fallen from her small plastic slide, he said.

“We were all getting heated,” he said. “I got told to leave the house and I left.”

Witness Kiana Funaki, who lived in a sleepout on the property, said she would sometimes hear banging from inside the main house.

“I could hear Arapera crying and I could hear Tyson yelling and telling her to shut up and stop crying,” she testified.

Sometimes she would see the primary caregiver disciplining Arapera as well, but it wasn’t the same, she said.

“She would give her a smack on the hand for drawing on the walls or growl at her when she wasn’t listening, but I never thought it was anything to worry about,” she said.

On the last day of Arapera’s life, Funaki recalled going outside the house to pick up an Uber Eats delivery about midday and seeing Arapera standing out in the cold wearing a singlet and no socks or shoes.

She was standing still, her head against the wall near the front door.

“I asked her if she was OK and she didn’t respond to me,” the witness said.

“She just kind of looked at me and then looked away and put her head back against the wall.”

She texted the caregiver soon thereafter to check on the child and was assured Arapera was fine.

“She’s been naughty all morning,” the caregiver texted back. “We’ve found that instead of hitting her she can just sit there.”

Later in the day, the witness recalled hearing more banging from inside the house along with the defendant yelling.

Around 3pm, she briefly saw the caregiver in person.

“She looked very upset,” the witness said. “I asked her if she was OK and she started crying and said Tyson was getting angry with Arapera... and [the caregiver] was trying to stop it and calm Tyson down. And she said Tyson threw her [the caregiver] into a wall.”

Funaki said she didn’t realise anything was seriously wrong until about 8.30pm that night, when she got a text from a family member who told her there were police and ambulances outside the property.

Around the same time, Funaki said, she got a text from the caregiver saying: “Don’t say anything to them, sis. Say you don’t know”.

About 30 minutes later, the caregiver wrote: “Can youse please not say anything to them? Please, for me”.

Just after 10pm, she wrote: “I swear we didn’t do anything to her. I f***ing swear”.

But Funaki didn’t reply. She instead showed the messages to police and said she didn’t know what was going on, she testified.

Multiple relatives of the child also wept today as they recalled their last interactions with Arapera.

“She was lovely. She was a good little girl,” Arapera’s great-uncle recalled of her, explaining that he would frequently talk to the girl over video calls.

The last call, he said, was about a week before she died.

“The first thing I saw was the marks on her face, her head, how swollen it was,” he said, recalling that the primary caregiver told her the child had fallen off a slide.

“When I talked to [Arapera]... it just looked like she was blind, just moving her head around trying to look.”

There was a long pause as the witness struggled to regain his composure.

“She seemed broken,” he said.

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

He recalled offering to pick up the child and spend the weekend with her, but when he showed up the next day the primary caregiver wasn’t there and he never saw the child alive again.

Most witnesses said today they had never seen the primary caregiver yell at or treat Arapera roughly, but one witness did give a different picture of how the two interacted.

Keriana Walker-Whakahoehoe was working at a Covid-19 testing centre on October 29, 2021 - just days before Arapera’s death - when she recalled testing Arapera and the child’s caregiver.

She had offered to give Arapera an oral test, which tended to be preferred by children more than the nasal swab, but the caregiver had said just to get it over with using the nasal swab, she recalled.

“She just had a dead look,” she said of Arapera, who she recalled having no reaction as the nasal swab was administered. “No emotions... It’s hard to explain that look.”

Walker-Whakahoehoe said she always recommended that babies sit on the lap of an adult when receiving a test. But after the test was administered, the caregiver “sort of threw baby toward the car seat in the back” as if tossing a rugby ball, she said.

After missing the car seat, the child climbed in by herself and the caregiver drove off without fastening the safety restraints, the woman said.

Although Walker-Whakahoehoe administered hundreds of tests per day, that interaction was strange enough that she would remember it vividly when homicide detectives contacted her months later, she said.

The trial is expected to continue tomorrow before Justice David Johnstone.