Advocacy & Safety - Swiss cycling tourist felled by full beer bottle

From here...
http://www.news.com.au/travel/story/0,28318,25104391-5014090,00.html


POLICE believe a beer stubbie was full when it was thrown from a passing car and smashed into the face of a cycling Swiss tourist.

The Geelong Advertiser reports the weight of the fluid added to the shattering impact as it broke his eye socket, nose, a tooth and prescription sunglasses and sent him flying from his bike.

The 27-year-old tourist, identified as Thomas, lay on the bitumen verge of the Princes Freeway, blood pouring from the split in the flesh beside his nose, knocked senseless by a senseless act.

He was fulfilling a dream to ride from Melbourne to Geelong and on to the Great Ocean Road when the incident happened about 6.20pm (AEST) yesterday.

He had slowed on the Geelong-bound verge of the freeway to cautiously cross the Lara exit lane. He looked carefully and no cars were exiting. That's the last he can remember.
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"Then I remember walking on my knees and someone was talking to me, a witness," he said from his bed in Geelong Hospital yesterday.

"I told him I had hurt on my face and then I remembered something hit me on the head.

"There was blood everywhere and the pain, I was scared because I felt something was wrong with my mouth and my teeth."

Lara police are seeking leads on the incident and information about a dark Falcon they believe might have been involved.

"There was a passer-by who stopped and assisted him and apparently a certain car had gone past him with some young fellas in it and then the next thing this guy was on the ground," Leading Senior Constable Geoff Jolley said.

"It's ridiculous what happened, pretty callous."

Makes you realize just how much damage something as stupid as this can do.

Holy cow! I hope he isn't hurt as bad as it sounded like to me. To be honest when I saw the headline you had put up I thought it was going to be a biker that had hit a bottle on the ground, with like a litter kind of message behind it. That's full on assault or even attempted murder if the car was going fast enough.

I seriously hope that guy has as full of a recovery as possible.

Australia is the only country that seems to outdo the good old US of A in sheer senseless hostility towards cyclists. It's as if the entire male population of the island was born with an extra Y chromosome to an alcoholic mother.

If they never catch the kid, I hope it haunts him the rest of his life.

ouch!:mad:

The towns of Lara and Werribee (both along the Princes Hwy between Geelong and Melbourne) have a big problem of young men in fast cars with nothing better to do than cause trouble.

A remember a fun game that I once saw while I was a passenger in a bus. I have a bus driving licence and was chatting to the driver, so saw this 'game' up close and heard the drivers opinion of it. These hoons in their modified V8 sedans would get in front of the trucks and buses and do dumb stuff like slow down to the point of almost touching, or change lanes suddenly as close to the front of the heavy vehicle as they could. They would then speed off the exit, turn and re-enter the hwy on the other side to do 'laps' of the same stuff. The bus driver told me that early on many trucks and buses had braked hard etc and almost had accidents, but now the prevailing wisdom was to stay straight and at the same speed. Why? A sedan will bounce off you and be sent crashing off the road if there was a collision - let these idiots crash instead of you in the bigger vehicle. He said there had been fatalities where the idiots or their passengers were killed because of messing up in front of trucks.

These are the same idiots who have just tried to kill this Swiss guy! They will catch them, these guys are not smart and I bet the cops already have a fair idea who it is by the vehicle description.

The charges should be the same as if they'd used a firearm. Maybe we should think about re-opening that French Penal Colony on the island off South America.

The charges should be the same as if they'd used a firearm. Maybe we should think about re-opening that French Penal Colony on the island off South America.
Didn't Australia used to be a penal colony?

Didn't Australia used to be a penal colony?

Yup, but it's much nicer down there now. :D

Uh, with the obvious exceptions of the aforementioned miscreants.

What a waste of beer.

A shame such things still happen. The worst I saw was a strike on the helmet by some kind of stick - smashed my ex - wife's helmet and nearly knocked her down. She stopped and said she was OK, I chased the car and got the license number, looked at the occupants.

Other witnesses.

Trial, 3 years sentence, for the hitter. Think the driver got a suspended sentence. And a very long string of car troubles. The broken helmet really helped.

I hope that they can catch these guys....

If you've ever been hit by anything thrown from a car, you know how hard a blow he took from a full beer bottle.

Even a Dixie cup of Coke and ice hurts like hell. A full bottle -- that's a serious weapon.

Didn't Australia used to be a penal colony?

Which explains a lot, doesn't it? Either by hereditary or environment, antisocial behavior tendencies seem to be passed on in families.

Which explains a lot, doesn't it? Either by hereditary or environment, antisocial behavior tendencies seem to be passed on in families.Drivers do the same in the U.S. too, and we can't explain that away as "heredity" from a penal colony origin.

Drivers do the same in the U.S. too, and we can't explain that away as "heredity" from a penal colony origin.

Oh yeah.:rolleyes:

One of the reasons that the British colonized Australia after American independence was because they could no longer send prisoners here. As I recall Georgia was originally founded as a penal colony.:D

Drivers do the same in the U.S. too, and we can't explain that away as "heredity" from a penal colony origin.

Well, a lot of us were the descendants of the wierdos, wacos, screwups, and misfits who got kicked out of the more respectable countries. And we pushed our wierdos, wacos, screwups and misfits out to the Western frontier until there was no farther West to go; which explains California, doesn't it?