Rag-and-bone man, 70, stabbed driver over ....

[cooleo]

Source: The New Paper

THE short, white-haired and frail-looking old man had to be assisted by two escorting police officers as he shuffled slowly out of the courtroom.

Koh Tian Seng, 70, a rag-and-bone man, had just been sentenced for stabbing a man half his age with a knife during an argument.

He was jailed 12 months last Friday for voluntarily causing grievous hurt to Mr Tan Meng Tee, 34, a deliveryman.

Koh had earlier pleaded guilty to the offence.

The court heard how the two men had argued over dog poo at Kaki Bukit Industrial Terrace on Dec 9 last year.

It became violent when Mr Tan slapped the older man, Koh, who retaliated by pulling out a knife and thrusting it into Mr Tan’s stomach.

Despite being hurt and bloodied, the court heard how Mr Tan pulled the knife out, threw it on the ground , kicked it aside, and fought back.

Even as he was bleeding, he knocked Koh to the ground, pinned him down, and rained blows on him.

He only stopped when a colleague restrained him.

The fight landed both men in hospital.

Koh suffered a bruise and laceration on his left eye, as well as bruises on his chest.

Mr Tan suffered a stab wound about 2.5cm long and had to be hospitalised for five days.

A medical report from Changi General Hospital (CGH) said the knife blade had extended upwards to the right side of his rib cage.

Dr Siow Wei Ming, a medical officer at CGH’s department of surgery, wrote: “If there had been involvement of either his visceral organs (such as the heart or the lungs) or his blood vessels in the chest, the stab injury could have caused death.”

The court heard that Koh, who lives and collects scrap material in the industrial estate, looks after the stray dogs and cats in the area, feeding them daily.

But the way he fed them was also a source of friction between him and shop tenants in the area. They accused him of causing a mess when the animals ate and defecated near their shop units.

The court heard that at around 5.30pm on Dec 9 last year, Mr Tan, who works for a company selling automotive batteries at Kaki Bukit Industrial Terrace, was walking a dog along the road, near his company’s shopfront.

When he walked past Koh, the latter scolded him.

The two men got into a heated quarrel and Mr Tan was stabbed.

Mr Tan has since recovered. He returned to work in February, a colleague told The New Paper.

The colleague said that Mr Tan has been working at the company for two years and described him as more than 1.7m tall, muscular and “big-sized”.

“He’s okay now. He’s an iron man,” said the colleague, who declined to be named.

He said that Mr Tan and Koh had no history of bad blood, but both were prone to outbursts of bad temper.

It was probably a disagreement over dog poo that sparked the fight that night, workers in the area said.

Mr Abdul Rahim, an operations manager at a dormitory in the estate, said: “He (Koh) was always feeding the dogs and cats in front of the shop units, and the animals would poo and create a mess. This made people unhappy.”

Koh told Institute of Mental Health psychiatrist Stephen Phang that he had been feeding two stray dogs that evening when Mr Tan confronted him and demanded to know why he was doing so.

Mr Tan then hurled Hokkien vulgarities at Koh and they got into a shouting match.

Koh had also drunk two cans of beer before the incident, the psychiatrist noted.

But that did not impair his ability to know what was going on, and he was aware of the nature of his acts then, Dr Phang wrote.

In his mitigation, Koh’s lawyer Mr Josephus Tan, who took on the case pro bono, told the court that his client had reacted defensively to Mr Tan’s slap and was “very remorseful for reacting in a disproportionate manner”.

The lawyer also said that the attack was not premeditated but committed “out of character on the spur of the moment”.

Koh, who collects cardboard boxes and cartons for a living, carried a knife with him “for his daily work and culinary purposes”.

The defence counsel pointed out that Mr Tan was “physically superior” to Koh.

He asked for leniency on behalf of his client given his advanced age and the positive character references from those working in the industrial estate.

The character references, from 10 people, which were tendered to the court, showed that Koh was “inherently a non-violent person, and on the contrary, a kind-hearted person who just wanted to help the animals in the vicinity”.

To Ms Francesca Lok, a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) volunteer who had known Koh for three years, the latter “valued the stray cats and dogs more than himself”.

He would spend his meagre earnings on food for the strays, which included two dogs he had rescued and kept as pets.

She wrote in her petition for Koh: “(He would) also get leftovers from the coffee shop to feed himself and his two dogs.”

The court heard that years ago, Koh even moved out of the home he shared with his 80-year-old wheelchair-bound elder brother when the latter disagreed with his adoption of the two stray dogs.

He stayed under the Paya Lebar flyover, sleeping on flattened cardboard boxes, until workers at the Kaki Bukit Industrial estate, where he collected discarded items, cleared out a rubbish collection hut in the estate and offered it to him as a home.

And it was there that he lived until the incident last year.

In sentencing Koh, district judge Ng Peng Hong said that despite the mitigating factors highlighted, “it must also be considered that it is a serious offence with up to 10 years imprisonment”.

But he took Koh’s “age and the character references submitted” into consideration in imposing sentence.

For voluntarily causing grievous hurt, he could have been jailed 10 years and fined.