A Personal Statement from Zain Dean

[mofangongren]

In the statement, this is the problematic part:

When we neared the 101, the driver tried to wake me up asking, ‘where do you live, what’s your address?’ I turned around in a half-sleeply state and saw a man I didn’t recognize thus I didn’t want to give him any details of where I lived etc. I simply asked him to drop me off at the corner (Songren and Xinyi) of the street behind my house. I then got in the drivers seat (not even at this point noticing the damage on the car) and drove the last couple of hundred meters home, parked the car and somehow made it up to the house.

On one hand, he supposedly slept right through an accident that crushed the front of his car, destroyed a scooter, and snuffed out a life. And then a couple minutes later the driver can just wake him up with a simple question and, presumably, a little nudge? And he's somehow already making decisions about the sorts of chaps he wants to give his home address to? I've been through a couple of car accidents in my life, and those I know who have too shore up my basic experience that car accidents are really, really loud.

It sounds like the law enforcement and media have not extended him the courtesy of treating him nicely -- something that few facing allegations of well-known crimes have gotten. And it is unfortunate that the very fact of his being a foreigner living here makes him the equivalent of a Lantern Fish in the fishbowl of Taiwan TV news. Had he been the victim of the hit-and-run, the nature of the news media here is that his death would also have attracted some similar interest for a time. I figure that we can evaluate the civil and human rights by those of the weakest among us -- and frankly I'd be afraid for the fairness of any criminal investigation in which the accused's exoneration centers firmly on an alibi coming from the employee of some possibly gangster-run hostess club being the driver.

No matter who killed the poor kid on his scooter here, there's an awful lot of hurt going on in that family, and they deserve some justice in the form of the right person being punished. Many's the time we've lamented the passing or horrible injury to one of the foreign community from hit-and-run accidents presumably involving local drivers. However, that quote from Dean's statement above really doesn't make sense to me. Dean admits he was behind the wheel of his car while blitzed, and the only question is "when" -- before or after the fatal hit-and-run. The part where he says he snoozed so deep (that he couldn't hear a massive crash) and so light (that a mere address question was enough to get him up) appears inconsistent to me.

[Stray Dog]

Unconsciousness is very different to 'snoozing'.

[mofangongren]

And that's the thing, it's hard to go right from so-unconscious-I-couldn't-hear-the-Titanic-sinking-around-me to "oh-just-drop-me-here" sleepy. I mean, it takes a good while for being completely and utterly blitzed to wear off. His trip from the supposed KTV site, presuming the "Sun Chiang" in his statement is "Song Jiang Road," appears to be not all that far.

There's a lot of space within this thread that seems to circle around the issue of whether Dean was somehow "dodgy" or "evasive" with regards to his prior criminal case and the changing of his name, but by and large that stuff's not relevant. The intellectual-property convictions don't necessarily mean a lot -- appears he was nailed for use of unlicensed software, not for hawking pirated products. According to a couple of posters he had a personal reason for changing his name, but it would also appear that when the system did not find him under that name he didn't exactly rush to sort things out. I suppose this case highlights that not maintaining a clean record can lead to all sorts of aspersions and suspicions. As to whether the wife he referred to in his statement is actually his girlfriend, I've met numerous people in long-term relationships who are not married officially but who refer to their significant other as a "wife" or "husband". In these modern days of greater unmarried cohabitation, I suppose it's tempting to try to avoid the complexity of saying "She's my really important girlfriend -- not legally my wife, but something like a common-law wife if they had that here."

The attempt to junk the car might have been honest, possibly not. If he was not at the wheel when the accident happened, perhaps he's right in saying that he didn't know the car had done more than bumped a lightpole and then just did the cost-benefit analysis of fixing the damage. If Dean was at the wheel when the accident happened, then it's also possible that he was blitzed enough not to know what he'd done -- bizarre incidents of old people and drunks driving home with corpses stuck in their grills and windshields have appeared in the "News of the Weird" section. The way the car was taken to the shop would appear to have been done in a not very secretive way, which could indicate that Dean did not know. But as I note above, not knowing doesn't mean that he didn't do it.

[*monkey*]

According this China Post article, Zain Dean's wife has been charged with trying to dispose of the vehicle.

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/loca ... friend.htm

[the chief]

According this China Post article, Zain Dean's wife has been charged with trying to dispose of the vehicle.

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/loca ... friend.htm

Uhhhh, is it just me, or would a smart attorney be sharpening his defamation pencil and looking up the address of the CP publisher??

Zain Dean, the British hit-and-run driver...

[*monkey*]

Chief, as I'm sure you already know, you can't sue anyone in Taiwan for libel unless you can prove intention to defame and there is some financial injury as a result. The media in Taiwan are well protected by the law and as a result can print pretty much anything they want to and get away with it. The Chinese and Chinglish papers here don't bother to check facts simply because there's no incentive (financial or otherwise) to do so.

On a side note, Dean's wife holding her nose while passing the photographers was kind of cool. "Rude, vile pigs" they are indeed.

[Tempo Gain]

One thing I often think about this, is this the kind of guy who would try to pin something like this on someone else? That takes a lot of nerve, for sure there are those who might do it but not everybody. Much less on an employee of an apparently sketchy club. Also the alleged "other driver" is playing it really low-key. Maybe that's just the best move for him, but I can kind of imagine him raising a real shitstorm.

[the chief]

One thing I often think about this, is this the kind of guy who would try to pin something like this on someone else? That takes a lot of nerve, for sure there are those who might do it but not everybody. Much less on an employee of an apparently sketchy club. Also the alleged "other driver" is playing it really low-key. Maybe that's just the best move for him, but I can kind of imagine him raising a real shitstorm.

Latest news, and, of course, this isn't "official", that is it hasn't appeared in any of the papers, you know, like the one where the guy's being specifically labeled as having commited an act for which he has yet to be tried, but latest news is they're taking forever to go to trial because the already circumstantial evidence is so weak, no Prosecutor will touch the case, it being pretty apparent it'll get thrown out the first day.
A forensic expert has identified numerous places where the security cam tapes from the KTV were clearly tampered with, and not very skillfully, either.
Upon cursory examination, none of the KTV employee's stories matched, and were consistently contradicted by their cell phone records.
The driver kid's deposition was wildly inconsistent and apparently collapsed upon even basic follow up questioning.
More than 5 Prosecutors have passed on going to trial, and it's apparently been hot-potatoed down to like the most junior staff, like under-30s, and they don't even want it.
As always, not stating guilt or otherwise, but there cetainly isn't, as some of us discussed previously, anything even remotely like a case here.

As for dozing through the incident, I think ZD indicated that the kid pretty much had to shake him awake upon arriving near his home.

[headhonchoII]

It's all about the evidence folks..everything else is just speculation.

[mofangongren]

There's a lot yet to be established, and I would figure that given the zillions of cameras around downtown streets that there would be one that would show the moment when the drivers were changed or would show when the KTV guy started to head back to his place of work.

There is room for a situation in which both the KTV guy and Dean think that they're each innocent of wrongdoing. If Dean was so blitzed that he didn't know he hit someone after he took over the wheel (like those numerous recorded instances of people who drive home under conditions of being drunk or senile with pedestrians stuck in their windshields or in their grills), then he really could arrive back home not knowing that he'd done it.

And knowing the crushing ineptitude that sometimes combines with the corruptness and paranoia of the gangster minds, I could also well imagine the proprietors of the KTV having some employee who would take it into their heads to alter the time stamps to "shore up" an already functional alibi. I mean, it's not like the privately owned security cameras are really there to protect anybody there in the first place -- the cameras exist so the management can keep an eye on things. Are the cameras even set with correct time stamping in the first place? I'd even have my doubts on that -- they'd probably have to fake the time stamps just to have something other than "00:00 01/01/00" on there.

Provided that Dean's car really was the one that hit the scooter rider, and of course Lord knows it's not the only black Mercedes car in Taiwan that was probably on the roads that night, then it probably comes down to when did Dean take over as driver of the car? If the driver switch happened on any of the zillions of roads covered by these security cameras, then it would probably be captured somewhere, even if not very clearly. And then you'd have to corroborate that with the footage of other cameras. But then, a lot depends on how long they keep the footage around. (The cameras in my old neighborhood connected into the local village head's office, and according to him they only kept footage for a set period of a few weeks.)

Dean claims in his statement that the driver switch happened at a particular place within a short distance of his home, and that would be a good place to look. Likewise, in the area of the KTV there would also likely be footage from the streets.

But then if there is no security camera footage that can help out, we get back to the fact that both Dean and the KTV guy were behind the wheel at some point. One of them was utterly blotto and shouldn't have ever been behind a wheel, and it's odd that Dean admits that he (Dean) was the one who insisted upon taking over the driving. In other words, according to Dean's version of events the KTV guy would've been perfectly fine with driving the whole distance if Dean hadn't insisted on taking over.

While I might almost buy the arguments about drunken unconsciousness being somehow "unpredictable", I might buy it if the car had hit a pedestrian but not where the car had demolished the substantially heavier mass of a scooter.