'Footage Shows Chow Tsz-lok In And Around Car Park'

The Coroner’s Court probing the death of Chow Tsz-lok has heard from an expert witness that someone, believed to be the university student, was caught on CCTV cameras walking alone from the second to the third floor of a Tseung Kwan O car park seconds before his apparent fall.

Chow, 22, was found seriously injured on the second floor of the Sheung Tak Car Park in the early hours of November 4, amid an anti-government protest in the area, and he later died in hospital.

Cheng Yuk-ki, a senior government chemist, told the court that he had compared Chow’s clothing that night to a person seen in various CCTV footage to piece together the student's movements.

Cheng used features of Chow’s cap, Adidas shoes, Nike bag, glasses, T-shirt and shorts to help him identify the student in more than 20 CCTV clips.

The expert presented those clips in court to show the movements of a man, believed to be Chow, from the time he left Beverly Garden, where the student lived, at around midnight to just eight seconds before he apparently fell from one floor of the car park to another at around 1am.

The footage showed that the man had appeared in Beverly Garden after midnight and entered the car park at 12:27am.

He was caught on camera inside the car park for around half an hour.

At around 1am, video clips showed him briefly returning to Beverly Garden via a footbridge linked to the car park.

There were others who appeared to be rushing back in the same direction on the footbridge at the time.

But in the same clip, the man soon walked back over the footbridge to the car park, and from there he headed straight up a slope from the second to the third floor, although the footage at this point appeared blurry and only captured the figure from a long distance.

A separate clip presented in court showed that the man walked up the same slope to the point where he arrived on the third floor at 01:01:39 am.

The expert said this clip was likely to have been the last time Chow appeared on surveillance footage.

Another piece of footage from the second floor of the car park showed a flash at 1:01:47 am.

The government chemist said he later conducted an experiment at the site to test his hypothesis that the flash was the moment when Chow fell.

He said he looked at live security camera footage at a surveillance centre while a dummy was being thrown from the third to the second floor of the car park, and saw a similar flash.

Coroner David Ko had earlier presented footage from a nearby estate which captured a black shadow falling in the car park.

Cheng said that piece of footage and the clip with the flash appear to show the very same moment.

The expert said judging from Chow’s walking pace, it was possible for him to have walked 15 metres from where he last appeared on camera on the third floor to a 1.2-metre-tall wall over which he apparently fell eight seconds later.

Asked by the coroner officer Timmy Yip whether it was possible that Chow could have been attacked by someone within the eight seconds after he arrived on the third floor, Cheng said no evidence supports that hypothesis.

Asked whether he could explain why Chow had walked straight from his housing estate to the third floor of the car park after 1am, Cheng said he could not provide any explanation for that.

Cheng said no surveillance footage showed that Chow had been with any other person after he had left home, nor did any footage show that he had quarrelled with anyone.

The expert was expected to continue giving evidence on Tuesday.