In an alley in Melbourne's Chinatown, a 12th grade student was beaten and kicked. Although the violence was a few seconds, he eventually died.
On a Friday night in April 2016, victim Longxiang Hu, also known as Jeremy, was knocked to the ground in Latrobe Place and was kicked in the head with his feet, and he never woke up after he fell into a coma.
Jeremy, a 19-year-old at Yarra Valley Grammar school, thought of Little Bourke Street in a fight with another teenager who liked his girlfriend.
But it was another young man, college student Shengliang Wan, who was charged with murder in a Supreme Court trial on Tuesday. Wan pleaded not guilty to murder but pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
The jury was shown three minutes of CCTV surveillance, showing Jeremy swinging against the teenager, while other young men watched.
Jeremy
When Jeremy falls to the ground, Wan steps his head on the ground with his foot. Wan is dragged away by another young man, but he returns and punches Jeremy in the head.
Prosecutor Brendan Kissane said Jeremy died because Wan kicked him in the head five times. These actions ruptured Jeremy's skull and caused hemorrhage in his brain.
At the heart of the case before the court was Wan's deliberate intent to inflict real serious harm, which was the defining point for the conviction of murder, Kissane said. He told the jury, "if you didn't have that intention, you wouldn't have stepped on someone's head with your feet, as you saw in the surveillance video."
Kelly, Wan's lawyer, urged the jury not to be prejudiced. After the fight, his client returned to Jeremy several times and asked him to go to the hospital, he said. He had said he was willing to pay for medical expenses and apologized for that.
"if you have questions, you should consider manslaughter," he told the jury.
Jeremy was not taken to the hospital until 7: 00 the next morning. The court learned that he was almost unconscious, or only a little conscious, that he had to be carried away by a friend. At the hospital, he could only use a ventilator to sustain his life, and a week later his life support equipment was turned off on April 23.
The trial on the case has not yet been concluded.
