Together with his good friend, Laurence Wong, they and their families have been hopeful that the 3 assailants would be brought to justice, but so far, this has proved elusive. They have been saddled with one disappointment after another, Paul tells me as we sit in his home in Singapore, together with his mother, Suzanna.
“It’s always more and more bad news,” Paul explains. “In June, when we came back, we thought there was hope. We went for the trial, the [courts] granted them bail. Fine. September, we heard nothing. No updates. Still waiting. Fine. December, while I was there in Australia, heard that the fella ran off. And now, when I have come back again, it’s another bad news. It’s ridiculous.”
While Paul is deeply disappointed with how the case has turned out so far, he is nonetheless still adamant that the law must take its course. “This must end lawfully,” he says. “If it doesn’t, it will be a challenge for me [to reconcile it].”
“I hope this incident has not shaken his faith,” Suzanna says, “because if you believe in justice, and that the law is able to help in the process, you have to have very strong faith before you can help others. If this case is not resolved lawfully, then it might be quite difficult for him [to maintain such faith personally].”
A bloody night
“The scene I still remember quite vividly that I can never erase out of my mind is when I knelt down and all I saw was a big pool of my blood [on the floor],” Paul says as he recounts the events of that night at Suntec City. “What I next saw was my whole arm soaked in blood. When I was in the ambulance I remember them cleaning all the blood off my right arm which [was covered in dried blood]. The whole [scene] has never been erased from my head. It’s only just me trying to make it better.”
Paul had just had his head slammed into the sharp edge of a pillar by one of the assailants. He was in a daze, naturally, his legs felt weak and his vision impaired. When he slumped to his knees, blood from his head gushed out. “That was scary because I never knew blood would flow out of my head that badly,” Paul says. “I was frightened, and the feeling of death was definitely looming.”
He recalls a flurry of thoughts skipping through his mind then. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, am I really going to die here? I’ve been fighting so hard for my future and I’m almost there but yet it seems the journey might be ending. At the same time I was also worried about my mom’s well-being and because I was the only son [to her]. I was also thinking about Laurence because Laurence is a very loyal kind of person. When he makes good friends, he sticks by them through thick and thin. And knowing Laurence, he would basically be so guilt-stricken for the rest of his life if anything happened to me. So in that sense a lot of things were going through my mind. I don’t know why but suddenly I had thoughts of my past coming to my head. I know it’s cliché to say that when people think they are about to die, they [experience] flashbacks in their head. There was guilt. Guilt of things I could have done better, people I could have treated better.”
“Those were the immediate thoughts that ran through my head. What if… what if.. I really thought I was going to die.”
In his semi-conscious state, Paul recalls hearing voices which he believes belong to 3 Malay girls. He later learned that the girls were trying to help him. They had gone to get some ice and tissue papers to try and stop the bleeding.
“My eyes were heavy and they were going to shut anytime,” Paul recalls. “I heard voices shouting: ‘Don’t sleep! Don’t sleep! Wake up! Wake up! Stay with us!’ But I was physically exhausted. I don’t know if it’s from the physical exhaustion or from the loss of blood, I won’t know but the thing is there was this moment when my eyes were really really heavy. I thought that was the end. But they kind of slapped my face. It was either Sabrina or these 3 girls who said, ‘Hey hey, don’t sleep, don’t sleep, bro!’ They kept saying, ‘Bro, don’t sleep! Don’t sleep! Bro, don’t sleep! Stay awake with us! Stay! Stay!’”
“My head was heavy. My eyes were heavy. Two times this happened and they again did the same, slapping me. ‘Hey! Don’t sleep ah! Don’t sleep!’ When they did this the second time, it was then that I saw the ambulance drive pass us and turned into the Fountain of Wealth area.”
“This is a nightmare scenario I never dreamed of.”
A mother’s fears
It was past 1am and Suzanna was already asleep in her home when the assault happened. “My husband [who was still working in his office] called me and said, ‘He’s been beaten up.’ Out of the blue, in the middle of the night. I was just trembling, didn’t know what was happening,” Suzanna says as she wipes away tears, her voice breaking.
Although it’s been almost 2 years since the incident, recalling how she felt that night still stokes the sense of helplessness and the sense of fear she had felt then. She had only been told that Paul had had a “cut” on his head. This made her even more afraid.
“We didn’t know what that meant, what sort of ‘cut’, how deep was the cut?” Suzanna says. “We were worried [because it was a head injury]. We didn’t know how it would turn out. It could be a serious injury. There could be brain damaged, for example. I kept telling myself, ‘He’ll be ok, he’ll be ok’ but naturally, you fear the worst.”
Aftermath
While Paul’s physical injuries may be healing or have healed, it is the emotional and mental scars which are harder to nurse. “Initially, I kept breaking out in cold sweat, waking up and having [flashbacks] of when I was kneeling there, when blood was flowing from my head. I’d told the psychiatrist that this was a recurring nightmare. It frightens me still when I pass by Suntec. I would shiver [in fright]. I’d been told by the doctor to go back [to Suntec] and face the fear upfront but it’s very difficult.”
The paranoia, as Paul himself puts it, became more pronounced when he had to move to Australia for his studies after the assault. One of the assailants, Nathan Robert Miller, is an Australian.
“I was afraid for my life as well, you know, that if these guys remained free, and somehow or other they saw me [over there], they’d get their people to bash me up or thrash me up,” Paul explains. “So these were some of the worries. It’s paranoia to the max but it’s definitely something I was coping with, with post-traumatic stress disorder basically.”
He is especially wary now of being in a crowd or enclosed spaces. He would turn his back to the wall in an elevator, for example, so that he feels safe that he would not be attacked from behind, which was what had happened at Suntec.
His studies have been adversely affected too. He has not done as well as he used to, he says, as he tries to cope with the rigour of law school and his personal circumstances.
As for his social life, he is also on constant guard of people and places.
“There was once I went to a club [in Australia] to meet my friends there,” Paul recalls. “I was very wary. I was worried. I was paranoid with the streets, people. It is a constant thing. The wariness that people are still going to come from behind.”
All these meant that emotionally, he became a withdrawn person, afraid of everybody and everything around him. “I tried to overcome it positively. I tried really really hard,” he says. “Tried to reach out to the Caucasian friends I had in law school as quickly as I could. The fortunate thing is, by the first semester, the friends who have been supporting me at Flinders have become great friends. Otherwise, without them, I probably would not have been able to cope.”
Wanting to move on but…
Paul and his friend Laurence have been seeking closure by doing everything they could to help the police in its investigations, but their effort has proved to be futile. It has left Suzanna, who has always had faith and trust in the police, with a sense of incredulity.
“Yes, totally,” was her reply when asked if her faith in the police has been shaken. “Before this, we do hear of instances where the police are said to not be doing their job. But we didn’t quite believe it as this never happened to us.”
“Before this incident, I had faith in the police, in the government,” she explains. “So this is what we believe all the time – that the police is supposed to uphold the law and mete out justice. But look at this case. What are we suppose to think? Are we suppose to trust the police still? It may end up that people will no longer trust the police. People may take things into their own hands and do whatever they can for themselves, rather than leave it to the police.”
Suzanna is particularly upset about how 2 of the assailants could flee from the law and the country. “Just because they have money, the can post bail and simply get away, just like that? Why doesn’t the police do something – is it because they are foreigners, is it because they have money to post bail? So, I don’t understand. It is unclear to me how the authorities deal with such cases. We want to get some answers from the police, from the government. Your own people have been hurt!”
Paul had been told by the police at one point that the assailants had wanted to meet with him to settle the matter. Paul rejected it as he was afraid that it may impair the course of justice he was seeking.
“Knowing this kind of thing, when you meet, they want to settle out of court, they want to pay you a sum and then get it over and done with. But that doesn’t teach the person a lesson because these fellas, they’re brokers. S$25,000 bail. They can easily give the S$25,000 to someone to just bail him out.”
Even compensation would be inappropriate, Paul feels, because it is not punitive in nature.
“We were of the perspective that these people should be punished because, I mean, if these persons were just drunk and by chance they got themselves in the crossfire and hurt someone, yea maybe we would just say yea, ok, we’ll say, ‘This is a wrong-place-wrong-time event.’ But these guys were people who jumped on a cab, started the fight, almost killed an old man who then cried to me the next day over the telephone to say, ‘Thank you very much for saving my life. If not for you, I wouldn’t know if I’d still live.’ And because of [the assault] he said that he developed a fear of driving at night. He cried over the phone. It left me with a deep impression.”
Keeping faith
The biggest obstacle for Paul is perhaps a moral one – how he reconciles being a practitioner of something which he has loved since young, on the one hand and, on the other, his personal and first-hand experience of it which has left him struggling to retain faith in it.
Perhaps some sense of closure will come when he meets Miller in prison, which Paul applied to the Prison Service on Monday for.
“Some things must come to an end,” Paul says. “Miller is serving time. Like Laurence said, it doesn’t matter if it’s 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years. The thing is he has been judged, put through court, and sentenced and is serving time now. So, in that sense, justice has been served on him. The reason why I thought of going to prison to see [Miller] is to find ways to reconcile the differences.
“I’m not out for blood. I’m just out for justice to be served.”
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Read also our earlier report: Losing faith because of police’s incompetence.
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