By Cam Lucadou-Wells
An illegal immigrant has been jailed after stabbing a man several times in a dispute over tourist visas at a Springvale boarding house.
Yong Choy Chee, 35, pleaded guilty to recklessly causing serious injury at the Supreme Court of Victoria for inflicting head wounds and severing an artery in his victim’s armpit in Elm Grove on 11 November 2016.
After the attack, the victim collapsed on a kitchen floor.
He suffered significant blood loss and had to be revived with 24 minutes of CPR at The Alfred hospital that night.
After surgery, he remained in ICU for six days.
Chee and his victim were both Malaysian citizens who had outstayed their tourist visas, sentencing judge Lex Lasry stated on 23 June.
The victim had been angry that he’d given Chee’s cousin money for further visas but they had not been finalised, Justice Lasry said.
Later that night, Chee stabbed the victim. But there was dispute in court over whether the victim or Chee brought the knife to the fight.
Justice Lasry said it was most likely that Chee’s version was true – that the drunken victim brought the knife to Chee’s room and dropped it when his hand was caught in the door.
Chee picked up the knife, and “overreacted” in a “spontaneous” manner to the original threat.
“You did not provoke the confrontation and I am not satisfied that it was you who introduced the knife into the conflict though you later used it.”
Despite the victim later denying he was drunk, he recorded a “very high” blood-alcohol reading of 0.166.
After the stabbing, Chee left to Sydney and worked hard as a chef. He wasn’t arrested until more than two years later.
Chee came to Australia in 2016, with the hope of finding work and earning more money than he could in Malaysia, Justice Lasry said.
His deportation back to Malaysia was “inevitable”. But he was looking forward to reuniting with his family after being in custody since February 2019.
The judge accepted Chee’s remorse. With no history of violent offending, he was likely to hereafter “live in a law-abiding way”.
Chee was jailed for three years with no parole.
