A Chinese man killed his girlfriend brutally before plunging from a Sydney apartment building, causing unimaginable sorrow and sadness for the woman’s bereaved family, a court has heard.
Weijie On June 27, 2020, in the southern Sydney suburb of Wolli Creek, he stabbed 19-year-old student Liqun Pan before he fell from the fourth storey of the apartment building.
Pan’s killer sat in a wheelchair and donned prison greens as he listened to her father’s moving testimony being read out in the NSW Supreme Court today.
Zewu Pan read the statement to the court in English, but it was written in Mandarin.
“Our hope and happiness evaporated the moment her life was viciously taken away,” Zewu Pan added.
“The news of her death brought devastation to our entire family.”Everyone was devastated by the unfathomable agony. We were unable to believe it was real.” Pan, an English language learner from a family of farmers in the Guangdong province, emigrated to Australia.
The court heard that Pan’s family encouraged her to pursue a higher degree.
Unfortunately, the woman’s life was taken far too soon by her vicious murder.
She was a kind, wise, and diligent person. Her father asked, “Why is God treating her like this?” “Why is God so cruel to us?” Pan expressed his desire to see the “vicious and heartless murderer” spend the rest of his life rotting in prison.
“He must be made to pay for his evil deed.”
The court heard that two days prior to the murder, He had taken five boxes of nitrous oxide, also referred to as laughing gas, on a regular basis.
Geoff Harrison, the defense attorney, contended that his client was in a drug-induced psychotic state when the killing occurred.
However, forensic psychiatrist Adam Martin said in court that before to Pan’s death, the Chinese national had displayed “a degree of control and coercive behaviour” over Pan.
A court filing states that he got into arguments with his girlfriend because he thought she had a “sugar daddy” and threatened to beat her up if she didn’t finish her responsibilities.
Pan once signed a contract promising not to go to bars, consume alcohol, or interact in any way with people of the opposite sex before flying back to China.
Crown prosecutor Rossi Kotsis questioned, “Is it possible, doctor, that the murder had nothing to do with nitrous oxide?” Martin said, “Yes.”
Judge Julia Lonergan will have to decide if the alleged psychotic episode lessened his moral responsibility or if the laughing gas was just a drunken inducement.
The murderer had been trained by his family to make denials and assert that he had amnesia, even though he had pleaded guilty to murder.
He informed Martin in December 2021 that Pan and he had suffered injuries from “bad people” who had slain his girlfriend and thrown him off the building.
The hearing goes on.
