She remembers she instantly felt sick – then there was just blackness. It is a mark of the mind’s mysterious ways that, almost three years later, she cannot remember anything from the two days that followed.

She has been told she repeatedly called her father’s phone so that it rang and rang, never to be answered.

“That Saturday and Sunday is just a big, black blotch,” Ms Rollestone told the Mercury. 

“I was saying, ‘it’s just a bad dream, it’s just a bad dream’. 

“My ex-partner called the detective and put him on speaker for me to hear it again.

“I think I just went into shock.”

A highly intoxicated Kevin James Russell, 53, drove a knife into the back of Ms Rollestone’s father, 58-year-old Allan Dempsey, the evening of January 8, 2016, after he grew impatient waiting for an acquaintance to return to Mr Dempsey’s Cliff Road public housing unit with drugs he had paid $40 for.

In March a jury found Russell guilty of murder. Earlier this month a Supreme Court Justice ordered him to serve a non-parole period of 14 years’ imprisonment, with a balance term of ten years, concluding January 7, 2040. 

With time already served, he will become eligible for parole on January 8, 2030. 

For Ms Rollestone, who sat through three weeks of evidence detailing her father’s senseless death, the sentence is nowhere near enough. 

Read more: Transcript of friend’s desperate triple-o call to save Allan’s life

“No sentence could ever be worth my dad’s life – taken for no reason,” she said. 

“He [Russell] sat there with this smug look. He showed no remorse. The impression I got was like [the trial] was a big joke.

“To me, the justice system has failed.” 

Mr Dempsey was from the Woonona/Bulli area. His daughter remembers him as a hard worker and a devoted father with “old school” values, who encouraged her to “do a good deed every day”. 

He loved Mustangs and made tiny, perfect model replicas of the cars. 

He was good with his hands, and once had a business – Algie’s Stained Glass and Co – making stained glass windows and terrariums. 

“There was nothing you could put in front of him that he couldn’t do. Except the internet. And he didn’t like touch screen phones.” 

Mr Dempsey was planning a visit to Ms Rollestone’s Riverina home, to see his first grandchild, the week before he died. She wishes she had driven to Wollongong to collect him, but he told her not to trouble himself. 

Mr Dempsey was with his good friend Malcolm Roberts the night he died. They were repairing a pushbike, modifying a speaker and drinking beer when they were joined by another friend, Darren Holly, and a man they didn’t then know –Russell. 

Russell grew angry and impatient after Mr Holly left with his money, and said “I want me f---ing money back or some c---’s going to get f---ing hurt”. 

There was “aggressive banter” between he and Mr Dempsey, who told him, “you didn’t do the [drug] deal with me. And you wait. Don’t talk to me like that and don’t disrespect me. I don’t have your f---ing money”. 

Russell picked up a knife from the coffee table and held it in his hand for a while before he said something like, “I’ve had enough of this” and fatally stabbed Mr Dempsey. 

Ms Rollestone attended every day of Russell’s three-week trial. She heard how police found him in a Corrimal Street unit with blood still on his hands, which were then placed in police evidence bags to preserve the integrity of the stains. 

He told police, “yeah, I admit it, I stabbed the c-nt in the back” and “is that junkie f-cking c-nt dead yet? I do really hope you’re dead you c-nt”. 

Her heart pounded as the jury returned with a verdict. But her relief lasted only until this month’s sentencing. 

She holds a small stained glass bowl of her father’s close now. She keeps his ashes at home and watches video footage of his funeral when she wants to feel close to him. And she sees him in her sleep. 

“It’s the same dream – over and over. [Russell] lunges at my dad and I go to jump in front of my dad and then I wake up.” 

“[Russell] has taken someone’s life. What about the rest of us who are left to pick up the pieces, live with the nightmares?”