The victim of a stabbing in Vancouver’s Yaletown neighbourhood on Friday says he’s “disappointed” in the justice system after his accused attacker was released on bail.
Jeremy Kim was stabbed outside his apartment building near Mainland and Hamilton streets just before 1 a.m. after a confrontation with two teenagers.
The attack left him with multiple stab wounds and a fractured nose.
“These are very dangerous people and I feel like they have nothing to lose,” he told Global News in an interview on Tuesday.
“They know my address, they know what I look like, they were filming me, they have my face — and for them to be walking free on the street days after such a violent crime is unbelievable.”
Kim said he was outside his building smoking and on the phone with his fiancé, who lives in Italy, when he was approached by the two teens.
One of the pair began recording him and taunting him, including asking him, “Where are you from.”
He said he told them to leave him alone, and when they wouldn’t eventually swatted the phone out of the teen’s hand.
“That’s when he came up to me, and without any warning, just a couple inches from my face pulled out a switchblade roughly four, five inches long and started stabbing away,” he said.
Kim said he stumbled back into the lobby of his building and the female teen held the door open while the male pursued him and punched him in the face.
“I was stabbed in the chest and the ribs and the arms, so I think he really wanted to kill somebody that night,” he said.
Kim said the pair fled when he managed to call 911, and he chased the female teen to the nearby Yaletown-Roundhouse SkyTrain station.
Police arrived soon after and arrested the suspects and provided emergency first aid to Kim.
“We believe there was some kind of a verbal altercation that occurred before the altercation,” Vancouver police spokesperson Sgt. Steve Addison said.
“This was a violent stabbing. We are thankful we were able to arrest the person who has now been charged.”
Ian Koldenhof, 18, has been charged with assault with a weapon and possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose but has since been released. He is due back in court next week.
That has Kim incensed.
“I thought for sure these guys won’t walk free again and that they will go to jail and stay there,” he said.
“What they told me is they can only hold them for 24 hours and even to bring them to trial will take years.”
Kim said the justice system needs to be sped up so that victims like him don’t spend years waiting, and toughened up so that the process doesn’t end up delivering “a slap on the wrist” after all that time.
“We understand that any victim of crime wants to see meaningful consequences to the person who has committed that crime, and when those consequences don’t come immediately it’s quite common for us to hear from people they are upset with that,” Addison said.
“What I can say to that is that the wheels of justice often do grind slowly, and we too hope that in time there will be meaningful consequences in this case.”
In the meantime, Kim is preparing for his fiancé’s arrival in Canada next week.
But he says he’s now off work due to his injuries and faces a long road to recovery, both physically and emotionally. He’s launched a GoFundMe campaign in the wake of the incident.
“It’s just impacted me in so many ways,” he said.
“I (don’t) feel the same as I did before the incident walking around the streets. I’m going to have to live with these injuries for the rest of my life.”