Footage has emerged of the moment the driver of a 4×4 vehicle swerved into a cyclist, knocking him off his bike and onto a grass verge.
The incident, caught on the dashcam of a following car, happened last November on Inkerman Street and has been shared widely, including on the Face book page of the Australian Cycle Alliance.
After knocking the cyclist from his bicycle the driver gets out of his vehicle, gestures at the rider then picks the bike up and throws it over a hedge.
According to the description of the video on YouTube, the driver was charged with ‘Reckless Driving Causing Injury’ and fined $1,000 – the end result being described as “very poor” and the police as “unhelpful.”
The description concluded: “We are glad this has been finalised, but are sickened that these things happen.”
40 thoughts on “Video: Melbourne driver swerves into cyclist and rams him off the road”
Beyond words!
Beyond words!
Quote:
Why is this never assault and battery? Or attempted murder? This is not an appropriate charge for a deliberate act of violence with a blunt instrument.
I like Australia and the
I like Australia and the Australians that I’ve met, but as a culture, they seem to ape the U.S. – hate for cyclists and as racist as you like.
Seems an idiot culture to me.
Seems an idiot culture to me. Watch a police programme on YouTube and everyone talks like a 5 year old. “Where’s your rego?” , ” do you need an ambo?” and so on. Even the politicians are at the articulation levels of a market stall holder. You’d get laughed at talking like that in any position of importance in the UK.
Bunch of hoons.
Yorkshire wallet wrote:
Says the guy from the union who collectively voted to leave an alliance because of xenophobia, and are now facing down a protracted, self-inflicted economic depression. . …
hahahahhahahahahahahahahahaahhaaaaaa
nigerian prince wrote:
Says the guy from the union who collectively voted to leave an alliance because of xenophobia, and are now facing down a protracted, self-inflicted economic depression. . …
hahahahhahahahahahahahahahaahhaaaaaa— Yorkshire wallet
…but it was free money for the NHS.
(Disclaimer – I voted remain and think that the public should have a second vote now that some facts are available).
Yorkshire wallet wrote:
Nice one, imagines if a similar muppet with moronic myopia made a massive sweeping generalisation of England from watching their reality TV shows like Geordie Shore and Love Island…? Best you stay there in your little village, after all if you left they’d be missing their idiot.
Roulereo wrote:
Nice one, imagines if a similar muppet with moronic myopia made a massive sweeping generalisation of England from watching their reality TV shows like Geordie Shore and Love Island…? Best you stay there in your little village, after all if you left they’d be missing their idiot. — Yorkshire wallet
I’ll have you know that almost all our villages have easily more than one idiot.
Typical Aussies and their lack of population density.
hawkinspeter wrote:
I’ve got more than one in my house.
Wha? Whas wrong wiff ya?
If the police won’t enforce
If the police won’t enforce the law, people will take the law into their own hands.
WTF-ingF!?! “Reckless
WTF-ingF!?! “Reckless Driving Causing Injury”? –
b0ll0cks! Attempted f-ing murder, surely?brooksby wrote:
Only if you can prove he intended to kill the cyclist. He didn’t, given he didn’t kill him while he was busy throwing his bike over a hedge.
vonhelmet wrote:
I suppose so, yes. But reckless driving causing injury just seems ridiculous – what did the motorist think was a likely outcome of swerving his SUV into the cyclist? I mean, it’s Australia so the cyclist was wearing his polystyrene hat, but the motorist surely *intended* to cause him at the very least serious injury? Is that GBH or attempted manslaughter?
vonhelmet wrote:
Only if you can prove he intended to kill the cyclist. He didn’t, given he didn’t kill him while he was busy throwing his bike over a hedge.
[/quote]
It’s reasonably foreseeable that the outcome might well be serious injury or death. It is certainly assault and battery. If the cyclist had died, it would have been murder.
rkemb wrote:
No, it wouldn’t, because you have to intend to kill or at the very least seriously injure someone for it to be murder. Most people aren’t thinking that, they’re just lashing out. The serious injury or death is foreseeable but it isn’t intended or desired in the overwhelming majority of cases.
vonhelmet wrote:
“Just lashing out” with a deadly weapon indicates an intention to seriously injure someone. Deliberately driving into someone indicates an intention to seriously injure them.
The fact that you can maintain that deliberately driving into someone is “just lashing out” and not an attempt to cause them bodily harm is a good illustration of the cultural issues related to the crappy charge and sentencing here. Is #metoo also “just banter”?
rkemb wrote:
I’m not saying I agree with it. The fact is, though, people are just lashing out. They’re not thinking about what they’re doing. They should be, but they’re not. The law should recognise the severity of the potential consequences, but it doesn’t. If I had my way, driving offences like this would be dealt with way more harshly. Prison sentences and terminal driving bans. Caught driving while banned? Back to prison, no questions asked. No leniency for “hardship”. Get a bus pass. Get a bike.
Until then, though, the law interprets this sort of behaviour as just lashing out, as though you’d thumped someone after they spilled your pint in the pub or walked into you on the street. That’s the law we’re stuck with. That’s the law the public want, apparently.
vonhelmet wrote:
You can’t conclude that at all. If you punch someone in a bar, there’s a good chance you’ll get charged with assault. This is a road-specific problem because there are driving laws which, in general, assume carelessness or recklessness but no particular malign intent towards an individual, and the police and prosecution services choose to pursue these laws rather that the more appropriate ones which are in fact available. Neither of these bodies responsible for choosing which laws to apply are “the public”. They’re just lazy. I’m pretty sure that if you actually conducted a poll asking, “If someone deliberately runs you over, is that dangerous driving or assault?” then you would not get support for your position.
rkemb wrote:
You can get people to agree to anything with the right survey questions. Besides, people will say anything to appear to give the right or virtuous answer. People will say in a survey that they want more police to enforce the laws on the roads, but their actions betray them. Look around you – people want to speed, jump red lights, look at their phone while driving. People don’t want to obey the laws and they certainly don’t want the laws to be properly enforced. As for whether the public gets to decide on these laws, this is a democracy, but people vote – if they can be bothered – for parties who cut police funding and they certainly don’t engage any further than that. We get the government we deserve and, by extension, the laws we deserve.
Just a $1000 fine for assault
Just a $1000 fine for assault? what would you expect from a country that fines people $330 for cycling without a helmet.
a1white wrote:
well… in this fine country you can drive around with only one working headlamp, drive over a man lying in the road, killing him, drive away, come back for a look and continue to drive away, wait until the Police come to your house and give a ‘no comment’ interview… all for £500 fine and 8 demerit points. Your point?
I wonder what the cyclist had
I wonder what the cyclist had done previously, there’s s a bit of arm waving and pointing back up the road.
So if I’m in Australia and I
So if I’m in Australia and I haul off and deck a bike rider going by, what am I charged with?
Burke wrote:
I think they give you a medal
This was not reckless, as
This was not reckless, as reckless would imply that any collision was merely the result of a poor decision, and this was entirely deliberate, so the charge should have been assault at the very least. Still, I suppose this is Australia so that is a pretty heavy fine for a driver, and I’m sure that if the dashcam footage didn’t exist, he would have walked away with no consequences whatsoever.
I can’t help wondering if the cyclist’s mates kept an eye out for the car and accidentally scratched it occasionally, then waited until the owner had it repaired before doing it again. Not that I would suggest for a moment that this might be an appropriate course of action for a scumbag driver.
If that video was admitted as
If that video was admitted as evidence, I cannot see how ”Reckless Driving Causing Injury’ and fined $1,000′ was any sort of justice. Beyond belief. From the video the motorist points down the road implying that something else went on earlier, which would seem to make his ‘action’ some kind of punishment, where the vehicle appears to have been deliberately used as a weapon.
dassie wrote:
Maybe the video wasn’t used as evidence in Court. There are a number of countries even in the rest of Europe where it wouldn’t be allowed into evidence. In Austria and Luxembourg even the use of the camera would be an offence. Many other countries will not allow footage to be used as evidence.
Hopefully the cost of fixing
Hopefully the cost of fixing a nice deep gouge in the car door was more than AU$1000. Plus whatever the cyclist claimed in damages. But that is scant comfort for being on the end of such a brutal assualt with a deadly weapon.
Pretty shameful representation of Australia if that is accepted as a trivial offence against the victim.
Victoria police appear to
Victoria police appear to have acted in good faith – the driver was actually charged with some pretty serious offences but apparently the Magistrate threw out the serious charges…
“Court documents obtained by Fairfax Media reveal, Michael Giarruso, 27, fronted the Melbourne Magistrates Court on June 25 and pleaded guilty to recklessly causing injury over the November 9 incident.
He was convicted and fined $1000 by magistrate Franz Holzer.
Four other charges were struck out including careless driving, unlawful assault, intentionally causing injury and reckless conduct endangering serious injury…………”
Fairfax Media are owners of TheAge a Melbourne based newspaper (sometimes paywalled / sometimes not depends on cookies and hits I guess)
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/grotesque-attack-cyclist-sideswiped-thrown-from-bike-in-road-rage-incident-20181030-p50cs4.html
antigee wrote:
But he wasn’t driving carelessly: he knew exactly what he was doing.
antigee wrote:
Since the charges were apparently legally brought and match the offence, has the magistrate given any reason for striking them out? Surely there must be a court record with the legal reasons for striking out such obviously applicable charges?
7 News Melbourne has tweeted
7 News Melbourne has tweeted this and there seems to be a lot of agreement in reponses to the fact that a) the driver’s act was well out of order and b) the sentence is way too lenient.
I conclude that not all Aussies are knuckle dragging savages. Obviously, some of them are obnoxious twats, just not all of them.
As for damaging his vehicle… Really? Should we really stoop that low?
I predict a review and increase in sentence.
The plot thickens, and there
The plot thickens, and there were previous incidents; apologies for the DM
“The other side of the road rage video that’s shocked the world: How the cyclist ‘keyed’ his attacker’s car moments before he was run off the road – and had to write an APOLOGY”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6332011/The-REAL-story-shocking-road-rage-video-went-viral.html
Of course, if the cyclist keyed the car, there must have been an incident previous to that, and I’m guessing the driver had done some pretty serious intimidation, being an Australian driver, in an obscene 4×4 and having previous convictions.
Brilliant. So some pleb keys
Brilliant. So some pleb keys a car and gets knocked off his bike and now the knuckle draggers have more ammunition for moaning about cyclists.
I don’t buy the ‘keyed the
I don’t buy the ‘keyed the car’ story. Firstly the link is to the DM (my default position for any story in the DM…), secondly, the driver didn’t check his car, or point at his car; his concern and focus was with something back up the road, and thirdly, if the cyclist had keyed the car, I don’t think he would be riding along in that calm manner when the car was alongside him.
More to this story, but I don’t think its that.
Disclaimer – I didn’t, and won’t, read the DM article.
Podc wrote:
If you’d read the article, you’d know that the cyclist admitted a charge of criminal damage in court, so clearly someone bought it.
vonhelmet wrote:
Thanks for reading it for me 🙂
Still think there is more to this though.
Podc wrote:
Probably, but even if there is, it’s still escalation and tit for tat that has ended up with someone being run off the road. The cyclist is not free from blame in this, and he could have backed down or taken things down a different route before it came up this. If your response to… something… is to key someone’s car then you are not making the best choices and things may not go well from there.
21 million Australians are
21 million Australians are judged by this 1 d’head.
Seems legit.