The father of Mo Li Kai-yin, a dancer who was severely injured by a falling giant screen at a Mirror concert in Hong Kong, has expressed shock over the acquittal of three backstage staff members involved in the show by the District Court.
Advertisement
In a letter posted online on Saturday, Reverend Derek Li Shing-lam said the acquittals were hard to accept given the suffering his son had endured.
The court on Friday found the workers lacked a motive to deliberately understate the weight of stage equipment, including the screen that collapsed and injured Mo and another dancer during the Hong Kong Coliseum show on July 28, 2022.
Inferior standards of work, shoddy stage design and an engineer’s negligence were instead to blame for the screen’s collapse, it found.
Li wrote: “I ask: If a driver with no experience crashes a car and causes severe injury or even death, can they also be acquitted on the grounds of being a ‘novice’?”
Advertisement
He went on to question “where the scales of justice were tipping” and underscored his son’s difficult journey towards recovery.
“How he has gritted his teeth to survive every time he was on the verge of life and death, and now, those who use ‘lack of experience’ as a shield, those supervisors who claim they ‘did not read carefully’ and hastily signed off – can a mere evasion wipe away tears of blood?