Kissing her beautiful baby daughter Jyniah Te Awa on the cheek, Lisa Cassidy felt an ache in her stomach. As a busy mum of three small children, Lisa rarely went out, but this was a social that she’d helped organise and although the thought of handing her precious seven-month-old to a babysitter tore at her heart, she decided to go. After all, she completely trusted the woman who held out her arms towards Jyniah and smiled warmly.
Tiana Kapea (30) was a cousin of her partner Ike Te Awa (24) and was brought up with him. She had always been so loving to little Jyniah.
“I said I would pick her up later that night,” recalls Lisa (24), of Auckland, but Tiana reassured her as she took Jyniah, “No, you’ll be drinking,” she said. “Just go and have a good time.”
That night was the start of a horrific nightmare for the much-loved baby girl, who was to receive the first of many bruises at Tiana’s brutal hands. Within three months she would be dead, battered until her brain bled, during a weekend of torture by the babysitter who should have protected her.
Last month, Tiana was sentenced to life in prison for Jyniah’s murder with a 17-year minimum non-parole period. She had subjected the baby to horrific abuse, including putting her in a freezer, hanging her from a door, burning her and swinging her around by the hair.
In an exclusive interview with New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, Lisa and Ike have spoken for the first time about the lies Tiana told to cover up the vicious attacks. Up until she left Tiana to care for her daughter on the night of the social, Lisa’s mother and sister were the only people she trusted to look after Jyniah.
“In a year, I would only go out three or four times. I like being a mum and staying home with my children,” says Lisa, who had babysat for Tiana’s kids many times.
When Lisa picked Jyniah up the morning after the social, she noticed a small red bump on her head. “I asked what happened and Tiana said, ‘She just lifted her head up and bang!’ I believed her because Jyniah was learning to pull herself up at the time,” says Lisa.
A month later, Tiana knocked on Lisa and Ike’s door, offering to babysit. “She said, ‘Can I have her for an hour please? We want to go to the park.’ I was doing some spring cleaning and was grateful for the offer. She texted me an hour and a half later and said, ‘oh my gosh, we just had the meanest car accident – your baby’s got so many bruises on her head!'”
Tiana told Lisa she had forgotten to strap the baby into her car seat and, when she slammed on the breaks to avoid an erratic driver, Jyniah had fallen out and hit the floor. “She said she got the registration number and rang the police,” recalls Lisa. “Ike went driving all around oanurewa looking for the car. Later, we asked the police and they said there were no reports made about it.
“I remember Tiana getting out of the car and giving me excuses. It’s so sad thinking of the bruises on Jyniah. Now we know there was no car accident. Tiana had tied up baby’s hair and put cream on the marks, and made her look really pretty. My baby had a lollipop and chocolates in her hands.”
Another time, Tiana had put Jyniah in a chest freezer and closed the lid. She rang Lisa to say that her baby was cold and had unexpectedly turned blue. Tiana accompanied Lisa to the medical centre with the little girl, who was wearing just a nappy. The doctor seemed baffled when Jyniah quickly recovered after Lisa started breastfeeding her.
“The doctor then noticed a burn on baby’s hand and asked how it happened. Tiana said Jyniah had crawled up to the heater and put her hand on it.”
Later, Tiana admitted to holding the child against a gas heater and, according to her confession, she had put her in the freezer more than three times. But despite her admission, some family members still refuse to believe that she was capable of such cruelty. Even Lisa and Ike are struggling to find a reason why a woman who was a good mother to her own children would turn on their defenceless baby.
“Everyone’s got their own theories. I think she was jealous,” Lisa says. “Either jealous of my baby, jealous of me, or of me being with Ike.
“We have so many theories. Her family is in Destiny Church and she was going every week,” says Lisa, who adds that it was Destiny Church leader Richard Lewis who urged Tiana to confess to police.
The ill-fated weekend that Jyniah was kicked, thrown against a wall, shaken and smothered, Ike and the older children Kacey (7) and Centauri (4) had travelled to opotiki for the school holidays. on the Friday night Lisa’s friend turned up and begged her to go out. Finding her mum and her sister unavailable, Lisa asked Tiana to babysit. When Lisa returned from her night out, Jyniah seemed fine. They stayed the night at Tiana’s place and later the following day, Lisa’s friend turned up, wanting to go out again.
“I didn’t want to but Tiana said, ‘Just go. You need the break. It’s not like anything is going to happen to baby’.” Returning to Tiana’s place at 1am, Lisa found all the doors locked. “I banged on the bedroom window and the front door and back door but nobody came,” says Lisa who then went back home to sleep.
Waking in the morning with a sense of dread, Lisa texted Ike to say she was “missing him so much”.
“I had a gut feeling something was wrong but I thought it was because I missed Ike and my other kids.”
Lisa then texted Tiana to say she was coming to pick up Jyniah and straight away the phone rang. “Tiana said, ‘Something’s wrong with baby. She’s spewing everywhere. Get here now! The ambulance is coming.’ I jumped in the car and ran through every red light.
“When I got there, the ambulance was leaving. I banged on the door going, ‘open up, I’m her mum! What’s happened?’ At the hospital, Lisa was confronted by angry doctors who suspected her of abusing her daughter.
“They said, ‘Lisa Cassidy, your baby has some severe injuries. She’s got bleeding inside her brain. It’s not a good look. What happened to your baby?” But the ambulance officer was able to confirm that Lisa wasn’t at the house where Jyniah was injured. When Tiana arrived, she claimed she’d dropped Jyniah in the shower but later said she’d also fallen off the changing table and the bed and onto a hard plastic toy box.
“The doctors said, ‘No matter how many times you dropped her she would only have little bumps and bruises’,” says Lisa. Jyniah was transferred to Starship Hospital where Lisa was warned that if her baby did pull through she would be severely brain damaged.
“I said, ‘I don’t care – just bring her back to me. I’ll never go out again. Please, please, please,” Lisa remembers. Sadly, Jyniah died the following day.
More than a year later, Lisa can’t forgive herself for not paying more attention to her baby’s odd-sounding cry in the month before her death and her reluctance to go to Tiana.
“If your child is injured, don’t just take the explanation at face value. If it changes its cry or cries in a different pitch when they see a certain person, it might be a signal.”
Still shedding tears every night for her murdered baby, Lisa wishes she had never trusted Tiana at all. She pauses when asked how she now feels about Jyniah’s killer, then finds the words to describe the feelings she will carry for life. “I hate her with all my heart and soul. I hope she rots in hell.”
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