[quote=“Zain Dean”]This repair shop only has one slot for vehicles, so other cars waiting to be repaired must be parked outside on the public road. The owner of the repair shop (Mr M) asked me what had caused this, I said I didn’t know (not wanting to tell him that I had been to a hostess bar, etc). He estimated the repair cost to be quite high if we used new original (Mercedes) parts, but lower if we used second hand parts. Either way, he was not able to give a price, so I left the car outside his shop in full public view and then went home. By this time, it was noon Thursday, the 25th March.
(Note the car in question was a 1994 Mercedes Benz E320, which I bought for 100,000 NTD approximately 2 years ago, at the time of the accident, the market price for such car was approximately 60,000-80,000 NTD).
After a day had elapsed, I visited the repair store and learned that second parts would not be easy to find (radiator) and chassis straightening, numerous panel repairs and a new front bumper would cost over 100,000 NTD using original parts, and for second hand parts, he’d have to take a few weeks to find out.
As I had originally been planning to leave Taiwan at the end of March (all my friends on Facebook and at the Rotary club for example had known this in early March when I had told them) I decided to have the car scrapped instead. I didn’t see the point of spending a lot of money to repair a car, more than it’s worth, nor did I see the point of waiting for weeks until parts could be found as I was planning on leaving in the next few weeks.
(I had made the statement on Facebook and given a speech at the Rotary club to that effect. I had already started giving away my books and paintings to charity, etc. The fact I was getting ready to leave at the end of March, latest April, was not a secret to all those that knew me).
On Friday I told Mr M at the repair store of my idea, and he then proceeded to remove the DVD player etc from the car. I asked my wife to have the car scrapped. After she contacted the scrap yard, she received another offer instead. Instead of scrapping the car (which would be done immediately, on the 26th March) she was offered the option of selling the car instead (which would mean an ownership change that would happen on the 31st).
(Of course, if I had been planning to ‘destroy the evidence’, I would have taken the quicker option, and the car would have been converted to a block of metal immediately. By taking the slower option, I would be leaving the ‘evidence’ open to future investigation, not something one would do if he had the motive to destroy the evidence).[/quote]
This seems like a very reasonable explanation. I know for a fact that Mr Dean was planning to leave Taiwan very soon because, just before the accident, he promised to donate a load of tools to the SPCA because of it.
Innocent or guilty? Who knows? I don’t. You say you do; I say you don’t. That’s what we’re disagreeing on.
be able to give you a full 6 hours of footage from midnight to 6am, and it is harder to seamlessly replace ‘tampered’ footage back into the full 6 hours.
