For two days, a notorious gang enforcer known as "No Thumbs" and five cohorts threatened Tim Nam and his family, making death threats while trying to force them off the farm that they had rented for eight years.
Then, in a hail of gunfire, "No Thumbs" was dead, two of his companions wounded. Nam, transformed from victim to defendant, was arrested and charged with murder.
Two years later, Nam agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter. The judge in his case, nearly incredulous that Nam was charged at all, sentenced him yesterday to time served. The 29-year-old farmer will be a free man soon.
But Nam's life will never be the same. The farm west of Sydney has been sold. His girlfriend moved on to another relationship while he was in jail. He has lost two years with his son, now three.
At least one legislator has called for an investigation into how things got so out of hand.
The New South Wales state Supreme Court was told that Michael Pestano, a debt collector known to the Sydney underworld as "No Thumbs" and "The Gnome," and five cohorts went to the property in rural New South Wales state ready to wreak terror to earn A$9,000 for chasing off Nam and his family.
What had been a partnership with the land's owner, Colleen Taylor, to raise olive trees had gone bad.
Her efforts to evict Nam, his girlfriend, their 15-month-old son and Nam's parents had failed.
Armed with a gun, chainsaws and tool handles, Pestano and his men threatened Nam and his family. They smashed windows, cut the power and drained the water supply.
Police, called to the scene four times, said they would not intervene in a legal dispute and refused to tell Pestano and his men to leave.
"These people were hired to come and get us off the farm, obviously by any means they could," Nam's mother, Margaret, told Southern Cross Broadcasting last Friday.
"We were threatened ... with rape. They threatened to kill all of us -- including the baby," she said.
"They threatened to set fire to the house. It was a very, very frightening time," Margaret Nam said.
Nam's father, Laurie, said the situation took a sudden turn for the worst.
"They shot at us... bang, bang, bang," he recalled. "Tim was so traumatized he just sprayed back at them. It all happened in three seconds."
Nam had fired a burst of 10 to 14 rounds from his .22-calibre semi-automatic rifle, killing Pestano. Two of companions lay wounded.
Nam was arrested several days later.
"This has been one of the most troubling cases that I have ever heard," Justice Michael Adams said yesterday during Nam's sentencing.
He said that he was "astonished" that police had taken no action.
"This was a terrifying experience, the Nams were under siege," Adams said.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
RSS