“Nothing”.
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This is what a 17-year-old Illawarra boy has told a jury he remembers about April 8, 2017 – the day a fellow teen deliberately hit him in the side of the head with a metal scooter.
He was rendered unconscious immediately and later underwent emergency surgery for a fractured skull in Wollongong Hospital. He was in a coma for five days.
However, he told Wollongong District Court on Tuesday upon his waking, his fight had only just begun.
“I couldn’t walk, I needed a wheelchair and I could barely hold a conversation,” he said of his initial days in hospital.
“I got better over time but getting through the first few months were difficult.
“I’m not exactly where I was beforehand but I have adjusted to it.”
The teen was the first witness called in the trial of his young attacker, who, while admitting he swung the scooter and inflicted the horrific injuries, denies he did so with the intention of causing serious bodily harm in the process.
Neither of the teens can be identified because they were both 16 at the time of the incident.
During her opening submissions to the jury, prosecutor Emiljia Beljic said the Crown would call evidence from the victim’s best friend, who was with him at the time of the attack and witnessed what unfolded.
That teen took the stand on Tuesday afternoon, telling the court the incident had been preceded by a dispute between himself and a friend of the accused a few weeks earlier.
The teen said he had spent the night of April 7 at the victim’s house and the pair had been walking to the bus stop when they were confronted by the accused and his friend in a laneway, with the friend kicking the teen in the leg.
The teen said the victim and the accused’s friend got into a fight but the victim ultimately overpowered and winded him.
“That’s when [the accused] came up and hit [the victim] in the head with the scooter,” he said.
“It was in his right hand then he like, swung it back a bit and over the top and hit him in the head.”
When asked if either the victim or the accused had said anything immediately before the striking, the teen replied “no”.
Meantime, the teen initially told the jury that the accused had said to him “you’d better run c--t or the same will happen to you” immediately afterwards, prompting the teen to run back to the victim’s house and alert his parents.
However, under cross examination from the defence barrister, the teen admitted that he could not remember if the accused had said simply “run” or “you’d better run c—t”.
The trial continues.