I said, ‘That’s got to be a mistake.’
He said, ‘Well, I don’t know what he would have done if I hadn’t gone over. I just walked over and approached him. I wouldn’t describe it as yelling at him, but I certainly had a raised voice.’
‘Why on earth did you open the door?’
‘Because he was just sitting in the car with the window up. Otherwise I would have no doubt talked to him through the window.’
This was somehow missing the point. I said, ‘That was unwise, wasn’t it?’
He said, ‘It was unwise, yeah.’
‘How were you feeling at this stage?’
‘I don’t know. The adrenalin was going. I was thinking, “Shit, am I going to have to do something?” He looked like a big guy, as far as I could tell. He just looked at me and his look was very, very chilling. He looked angry, and . . . dangerous. And he reached across towards his glovebox, and I suddenly thought, “I’ve actually walked into something on the dark side. This is really serious, and I need to get out of here as quickly as possible.”’
I asked, ‘What did you think he was reaching for?’
‘A weapon. I don’t think he was reaching for his driving licence! A knife, gun, whatever — I actually did think “gun”. So I just slammed the door and went back to my car. I don’t think I ran, but I certainly went very fast.’
I said, ‘Okay, at this point, how do you think you’re faring in the story?’
He said, ‘The best thing to do would have been to just try to defuse the whole thing. Not done anything at all. Just pulled into the parking space, or actually just driven through and right away. I was rattled.’
I said, ‘Are you describing road rage?’
‘No. I think road rage is probably what he was feeling. I was feeling under attack. That’s what I felt.’
‘Under attack?’
‘He’d screeched to a halt in the middle of the road, and I thought he was going to attack me. And if that happened, I’d rather it was over there, because of Issie.’
‘And then?’
‘I saw him advancing rapidly on the car. He gets right in front of it and starts banging his hands on the bonnet and shouting. Very, very angry man.’
‘In English?’
‘Nothing that I can comprehend. So I sort of . . . I nudged the car forward, to indicate that I’m getting out of here. He starts coming around towards the driver’s door. And as he was doing that, I pulled forward. And it appears— I don’t actually— All I remember is that he wasn’t in front of the car when I drove forward. I don’t actually quite know still how he got hit. But he got hit. And when he got hit, there was a bump. It sort of felt, when I thought about it afterwards, that we’d run over his foot. Well, we probably did run over his foot, and he got serious injuries, as you know.
‘But he didn’t get run over in the sense that I ran him over while he was standing in front of the car. The doctor who we got to look at the injuries, the best conclusion he could come to is that his toe — the wheel had got his toe, and he couldn’t move out of the way. I was amazed and appalled at the injuries that this guy got, cos it felt just like a little bump.
‘So I’m driving down Mt Eden Road, past Galbraith’s, and I looked in the rear-vision mirror and I could see he was on the road and people were converging. I turned the corner and stopped. I dialled 111.’
‘How were you feeling now?’
‘Completely panicked. Well, I was feeling completely panicked when he started coming around to the side of the car. This whole thing was done in shock and panic. Not really thinking. Just reacting. Sometimes I have very fast reactions, especially when my kids are in danger. There was a time in Kings Canyon in Aussie . . .’
He told a story about a family holiday at the Northern Territory canyon when he saw Issie step back towards the edge: ‘Somehow I got to her instantly and grabbed her and got her back from the brink. Juliet said to me afterwards, “I don’t know how you covered the distance.” This,’ he said, ‘was like that. Instant reaction.’
I said, ‘You mean the driving away?’
‘Yep. Yep. This is my chance to get away, he’s coming around to the side of the car, things are going to get worse, because I don’t know what he’s going to do — open the door, drag me out of the car . . .’
‘What should you have done, when you look back?’
‘What the prosecution said, which is push the lock-all-the-doors thing. But I didn’t even know where in the Saab the thing where you did that was.’
I said, ‘But you drove off, and called 111.’
‘It took me a minute or two. My hands were shaking. It was a work phone, and you had to put a four-digit code in to open it. I probably spent two minutes trying to unlock it. Then I drove around the block, dropped Issie off at the studio, because there was nothing I could do at the scene, 111 are sending an ambulance, there are plenty of people there, and I didn’t want to ruin Issie’s big opportunity.’
The police called him, and asked him to return to the scene. Hallwright walked there.
I asked, ‘Where was Mr Kim?’
‘He was still lying in the road.’
‘In agony?’
‘Yeah, he was yelling. He was sort of bellowing, actually. He wasn’t screaming, but he was yelling.’
‘Did you think, “Oh, God, what have I done?”’
‘Well, I couldn’t tell how serious his injuries were at that stage. Obviously he couldn’t get up. I thought he’d broken a leg.’
‘What was going through your nervous system?’
‘I don’t know.
