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In the hours leading up to 2-year-old Arapera Moana Aroha Fia’s violent death, Jacob Puri-Hansen had such an uneasy feeling about the noises coming from the dwelling next to his that he reached out to the child’s father asking him to check on her.

“He’s a bitch,” Puri-Hansen texted Arapera’s father on Oct 31, 2021 — referring to Tyson Brown, who is now on trial in the High Court at Auckland charged with the child’s murder. “Been yelling at [Arapera] and smashing shit.”

Puri-Hansen added a short time later: “Bro, ask [the child’s primary caregiver] if she’s okay, if she needs you to come.

“Just be nice to her and ask her if everything’s okay. Say, ‘Is ... baby okay? If you need me to come and be there I will.’”

The father didn’t live at the Weymouth, South Auckland, property with Arapera. But Puri-Hansen lived in a sleepout on the property and Brown stayed there frequently with the child’s primary caregiver. The defendant had been diagnosed with Covid-19 days earlier and the entire household was in self-isolation.

The text exchange came after Puri-Hansen and his partner, Kiana Funaki, had heard banging coming from the adjoining main house where Brown, the child’s primary caregiver and Arapera lived.

“It was going on for quite a while,” he testified today. “We just heard a whole bunch of smashing and yelling and we were worried.”

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

The bangs were accompanied by Brown yelling and Arapera crying, he recalled. At one point, he said, he heard the child’s primary caregiver tell Brown to calm down. But the banging and yelling went on for over 15 minutes, he estimated.

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��“Don’t tell [the primary caregiver] or she will kick me out of the house and I’ll have nowhere to go,” he texted the child’s father at around 4pm after telling him about the disconcerting noise.

Less than two hours later, Brown would be searching Google for “how to wake someone up from being knocked out” and the child’s primary caregiver would be searching “how long can a baby be unconscious for”, prosecutors pointed out earlier this week as Brown’s murder trial began.

The primary caregiver, who has name suppression, was set to go to trial this week alongside Brown but she instead pleaded guilty last week to manslaughter for failing to protect the child. She is expected to testify against Brown later in the trial.

Prosecutors have warned jurors that they may not like the primary caregiver, who was witnessed on at least one occasion treating Arapera roughly in the days leading to her death. But it was Brown, prosecutors contend, who inflicted the fatal blunt force trauma to Arapera’s head that resulted in her death.

The defence, meanwhile, has indicated it will argue that the primary caregiver is the one who administered the blows.

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

Jurors were also read a statement today from firefighter Roy Harris, who recalled arriving at the child’s house at 8.16pm on October 31, long after the alleged Google searches.

“I found a young child laying face up on the floor,” he said, explaining that CPR was administered after she showed no signs of life.

He and paramedics were able to get the child’s pulse back and they carried her to the dining room table to continue working on her before rushing her to Starship hospital in an ambulance, he said.

The child’s primary caregiver seemed “extremely distressed” and was sobbing at times, he said, while Brown was calmer.

“Tyson didn’t say much,” he said.

The primary caregiver told the firefighter that the child had fallen while playing on a slide in the front yard of the house. During opening statements earlier this week, the Crown prosecutor was able to hold the small plastic toy with one hand as he showed it to jurors. Defence lawyer Lester Cordwell later conceded during his own opening statement that the injuries couldn’t have been caused by a fall from the slide.

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