[david.garrett84]

Quote:

IT WAS terror. Sheer, unmistakeable terror. [Love how the journalists are parroting the prosecution's case as if it's established fact.]

When the cries of Warriena Wright rang out, via an audio recording, across the Brisbane Supreme Court on Tuesday, the chilling tape left no question the 26-year-old was in fear for her life [great media *impartiality*, again] in the moments before she plunged to her death from the balcony of Gable Tostee’s 14th floor Gold Coast apartment.

The voice of Tostee, which had, in the recordings played on Monday, seemed so calm and rational, suddenly turned.

The Crown earlier argued it could best be described as threatening and intimidating. [This is much more non-partisan reporting, but too late.]

Witness after witness on Tuesday testified that there was something different about these screams.

They were not just regular cries, according to James Evans, who was passing by the Avalon Apartments when Ms Wright fell from the 14th floor balcony of the apartment belonging to Tostee on August 8, 2014.

“It wasn’t just an ordinary scream. It was a terrified scream,” he testified.

He then heard what he described as “a large bang”. Minutes later, he saw a man later identified as Tostee running from the apartment building on foot.

Nick Casey, a hairdresser, was visiting a friend in the apartment two levels beneath that belonging to Tostee, when he heard cries for help from above.

When he went to the balcony and looked up, he saw a woman lowering herself over the balustrade.

“I heard her say, ‘I want to go home’. I heard her say, ‘help’ and at that point I said to her, ‘go back inside’ and it wasn’t long after that she fell.”

Mr Casey’s may well have been the last voice Ms Wright ever heard.

“She fell straight past where I was standing on the balcony and ricocheted off a few balconies below us and kept on going to the ground,” he said.

...

http://www.news.com.au/national/queensla...a474f631fd

A complicated but stupid case. There are many news stories about this and none of them really encapsulates the general facts, as they're all too focused in portraying her as an automatic victim (and not of her own stupidity).

Basic story is:
- Gable Tostee met a New Zealander girl, Warriena Wright, on Tinder (she was on holiday as part of her attending a wedding here in Australia)
- They went to his Gold Coast apartment, drank, watched a movie, had sex
- The sex was quite rough
- She could not handle her liquor and became very violent (even the prosecution admits this)
- Actually, scratch the first half of that last part out - she became very violent just because she could
- She started trashing his things as well
- She threw rocks at him, allegedly hit him with a telescope
- She threatened to call the police (likely crime: him having sex with a psycho bitch)
- He restrained her, put her on the balcony and locked the door
- She went dangling off the edge (presumably to get to the balcony of the apartment below)
- She fell off and died (his apartment was on the 14th floor/15th in American terminology)

Features/background of Gable:
- Clearly an unconventional guy
- Socially awkward, to the point where he could at one stage credibly claim autism (this diagnosis was later denied by a doctor, but he was evaluated as having social anxiety etc)
- Despite his womanizing, a loner
- Has served jail time for a previous incident involving a police chase. In fact, he served this time after the balcony incident

The reality of Gable's situation is this:
1. Recording his sexual encounters, at least the audio of them, has saved his neck from a certain murder conviction. Now the odds of conviction are "merely" probable. Of course, the general public and any white knight judge/jury are likely to construe the recording of these encounters by Tostee as some sort of very nefarious character trait. But imagine where he would be without having done this.
2. In almost no other situation would charges of this ridiculous nature be laid. The girl did not deserve to die, yet she was remarkably stupid. Plus, if she was attacking him and breaking his stuff, what do you do? If you strike her even reasonably in self-defence/to protect your property, you're done for assault. I've mulled over whether locking the door was the right thing to do, but in the heat of the moment, you have to give some leeway to the person (Tostee) being attacked.
3. The prosecution is saying in no uncertain terms that Warriena Wright "feared for her life." Um, so why did she attack him for no reason? I love how a woman can flip out, trash your place, and assault you, but when you contain her aggressiveness without knocking her out, she's suddenly fearing for her life.
4. Social media has ensured this guy will NEVER get a fair trial. Men promising to maim or kill him/wishing him death, women wishing him death and calling him a creepy murderer...
5. Massive amounts of attention-whoring is going on through girls claiming they either met him in person or spoke with him on Tinder. This guy got around on Tinder, that much is true, but it seems some girls are just promulgating their "stories" to sound important. Even the ones telling the truth about having interactions with him are a sight to behold for their "I told you so" post-incident boasting.
6. Unless you sleep, eat, work and do other things monotonously, your otherwise harmless idiosyncrasies will be used against you. Gable was not the most popular or slick kid at school, so he had to learn things on the fly as an adult. As a result, and perhaps for other reasons, his mannerisms, lifestyle and habits are far from "average". In the context of the trial, they are therefore seen as unacceptable and supposedly make him "creepy" and "predatory".