COURT: Defendant, you pleaded guilty to the offence of arson with intent to endanger life, contrary to section 60(2) and (3) of the Crimes Ordinance, Chapter 200, before a magistrate sitting at the Eastern Magistracy. That charge was an alternative charge to one of attempted murder, contrary to Common Law and section 159G and 159J, subsection (1)(a) of the Crimes Ordinance.
As you pleaded guilty to the arson with intent to endanger life charge, the prosecution did not proceed with the attempted murder charge. You entered your plea of guilty on 10 July 2023. Following your plea of guilty, you were committed to the Court of First Instance for sentence.
You admitted that on 28 October 2020, at Room 916, Yeung King House, Lai King Estate, Kwai Chung, New Territories, without lawful excuse, damaged by fire those premises, property belonging to another, intending to damage such property or being reckless as to whether such property would be damaged, and intending thereby to endanger the life of Yeung Yiu-wai. You and Yeung Yiu-wai are husband and wife, Mr Yeung being your husband.
The Amended Summary of Facts to which you have admitted are very detailed, comprising of some five-odd pages. I will try to be as succinct as possible in referring to the facts which support the charge. The premises in the charge is the matrimonial home of you and the victim, your husband. Also living at the home was your mother-in-law, that is, your husband’s mother.
At the date of the offence, you were aged 43, your husband was aged 46, and your mother-in-law was aged 72. After a very long courtship with your husband, you married him in 2017. However, you had frequent disputes with your husband as you always suspected your husband of having extramarital affairs to which he denied. Your relationship thereafter deteriorated.
In the late evening of 27 October 2020, your husband met you at the park outside your building to discuss matters in relation to divorce. Your husband insisted on getting a divorce, but you declined. After discussion, your husband returned to the flat alone and went to sleep in your bedroom that you shared with him.
In the small hours on 28 October, your husband woke up as he felt his right arm was spilled on with liquid. He then saw you standing beside the bed on the right-hand side. At that time, you were holding a lighter in your right hand. You then set fire to the quilt which covered your husband. You also stretched out your right hand towards him when he was lying on the bed. You then ran towards the door of the flat. Your husband immediately removed the quilt and got out of the bed and put out the fire on his body and left the bedroom.
In the meantime, his mother, who was sleeping in the other room at the time, was woken up by the smell of thinner. She then saw smoke and fire emitting from the bedroom you shared with your husband on the ceiling. Upon running to that room, she saw her son standing up and putting out the fire on him. You stood beside and said nothing.
Your mother-in-law and your husband then proceeded to the living room. After they arrived at the living room, you stood in their way and blocked them from leaving the flat. You then pointed the lighter flame towards your husband. However, his body was not set alight. Your husband and your mother-in-law kicked and pulled you away so that they could escape from the fire in the flat. You also ran away.
As a result of the fire in the flat, neighbours, a total of 80 occupants, were evacuated from the building to the carpark, awaiting the arrival of firemen and police. The fire was eventually put out at the flat at 0439 hours. It was the opinion of the Government Chemist, when he examined the flat, that toluene otherwise known as thinner was used to ignite the flat, and the fire in the flat was deliberately set.
Your husband was admitted to hospital immediately on 28 October and was discharged on 3 December 2020. He sustained burn injuries involving a total body surface area of 10 per cent with 3.5 per cent deep dermal burns over his right upper limb, 2 per cent mid dermal burns over his upper limb, and also 4.5 per cent deep dermal burns over the right lower limb. His wounds have since healed. However, he has mild hypertrophic scarring over his right upper limb and was wearing a pressure garment.
Your mother-in-law and several neighbours were sent to the hospital for smoke inhalation and some were discharged on the same day whilst others on the following day after observation and monitoring.
In the meantime, on 28 October, you had sent WhatsApp messages to your sister stating that you no longer wanted to live in this world and that you had left something to a friend for passing to your sister. You also sent messages to your friend expressing your unhappiness due to the poor relationship with your husband and you intended to end your life together with your husband.
After the fire, your sister and friend then recovered a backpack from your workplace at the Princess Margaret Hospital. They found in the backpack cash of $526,300, cash of various foreign currencies totalling $750, 49 pieces of jewellery, seven sets of life insurance policy documents, and a handwritten letter by you.
In the letter, you stated you had left some things for your children from your previous marriage and asked your sister to help look after your children. You had also asked your friend to help pass the insurance documents and gold jewellery to your sister whilst you stated you had changed the beneficiaries of all your insurance policies to your children. In the letter, you stated you no longer could live as your marriage was irreparable.
At about 9.37 am, on 28 October, approximately five hours after the the firemen had put out the fire in the flat, you approached the police officers at the flat as you knew they were conducting an investigation there. You told them you had resided there and you had set the flat on fire and you knew that the police were looking for you.
You were subsequently video-recorded interview between 28 October and 29 October. You gave a detailed account of various matters. On 27 October, you said you received a WhatsApp message from your husband asking to talk about divorce matters later that evening. You said you felt hopeless and wanted to end your life. You therefore wrote the handwritten letter. You then met your husband at about midnight on 28 October at the park outside your building and on hearing your husband insisting on a divorce, you became very emotional.
You also felt sad and that is why you sent messages to your friend and sister, asking them to take care of your children and themselves. You said by the time they had received the message, you would have already left this world.
At about 1 am, you returned to the flat and left 10 minutes later with the items as were found in the backpack by your sister and your friend, which, of course, included the cash, the jewellery, insurance documents. You then went to the Princess Margaret Hospital which is where you worked as a healthcare worker and left them in the locker there. That is when you then sent the voice messages to your sister and friend at about 0251 hours and 0314 hours.
You then returned to the flat at about 3.15 am. You took out the three bottles of thinner, which you say you had previously bought about two months ago for the purpose of cleaning the stains on the plastic flooring. You then went into your bedroom you shared with your husband and whilst your husband was sleeping on the bed, you poured thinner on various parts of the bed, including the bedsheet, the quilt and his body. You then used the lighter and set fire to the rear of the bed and the bedsheet caught fire. You said at the time you were not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol.
After the incident, you left the flat and went somewhere intending to commit suicide. After some time, you then surrendered yourself to the flat as you knew the police would be there looking for you. You said you set fire to burn the flat because you wanted to burn yourself but had no intention to kill.
Your mother-in-law stated that she was unaware that there was thinner in the flat as it was usually her alone who handled the household work of the flat. She stated you and your husband or her son rarely did household or cleaning work at the flat.
Prior to sentencing you, I called for two psychiatric reports, a psychological report and a victim impact report on your husband. Mr Hanif Mughal, who represents you before me has said you admit all the contents of the reports, save there are some errors as to the psychological report whereby at paragraph 7, you were admitted into a hospital for one night in October as you had attempted suicide and not in September for one week.
The psychiatric reports, both two doctors are of the opinion that you did suffer at the time of the offence from a severe depression episode with psychotic symptoms. However, you are currently in remission as you are on medication and had treatment since the date of your arrest. You remain mentally stable and there is no need for in-patient psychiatric treatment.
As to your background, you have two previous records which are related to immigration offences. You are 46 years of age, have been married previously but divorced with two children and married the present victim, your husband, in Hong Kong in 2017.
Regarding your psychiatric history, you were first known to the mental health service in 2020 when you were seen by a psychiatric consultant at the Princess Margaret Hospital on 2 October 2020 after being admitted for a suicide attempt by a drug overdose.
Having committed this offence, the psychiatrists are of the view that the reported onset of depressive symptoms occurred two months prior to the indexed offence which related to your marital problems and after what you say your husband had been having an affair. You had experienced a depressed mood with initial insomnia, low energy levels and negative cognition of feelings, worthlessness and low self-esteem. Prior to this offence, you had decided to commit suicide by burning yourself to death.
Regarding your employment, you worked as a medical assistant at the Princess Margaret Hospital, earning $17,000 a month. As described in the letters written in support of your work, you were working diligently and well.
In respect of the reason for committing this offence, as Mr Mughal has said, it was the suspicion of your husband’s infidelity that caused your relationship to deteriorate. On the evening of which he insisted on a divorce, you felt that your life was in a crisis and you were under severe distress. Because your first marriage had failed, you were therefore feeling worse and that your life and world was collapsing again.
Mr Mughal says your actions on the night in question were entirely out of character and triggered by the distress you were undergoing in your life. You have accepted, however, your responsibility as shown by your early plea of guilty at the earliest opportunity.
As Mr Mughal says, there are no tariffs for sentencing for the offence you have committed. The maximum term is one of life imprisonment. There have been three cases submitted to this court for the court’s consideration, which is The Queen v Shum Hon Kai and Another [1988] 2 HKLR 341, HKSAR v Wan Xiu Ying, CACC 151/2009, and HKSAR v Lam Kam Loy, HCCC 201/2016. The judgment in Wan Xiu Ying is in Chinese. The defence have prepared an English translation by letter and it seems that the prosecution has not opposed the translation of this judgment.
That case, Wan Xiu Ying, is similar to this case, whereby a mainland woman had set a flat alight in Hong Kong in a public housing unit where her boyfriend had lived with his family. That happened at 4 am in the morning and the neighbours had to use an axe to break open the gate of that flat. The defendant in that case had suffered minor burns on her parts of the body. She admitted to the police that two days before the fire, she had come to Hong Kong intending to collect a debt as a result of her breakup from Mr Yang, and she had deliberately intended to set the fire at the flat. In that case, the Court of Appeal upheld a sentence after trial of 12 years’ imprisonment and it was reduced to 8 years for her plea of guilty.
In this case, it is admitted by the defendant that she intentionally set fire to the flat. It appears that she had also intended to commit suicide and die with her husband. But she has, in her video-recorded interview, denied she had intended to kill her husband. As noted in this case, as a result of her plea of guilty to the arson charge, the prosecution did not proceed with the attempted murder charge.
In this case, the act of starting fire to the flat was, in my view, a premeditated act. This is shown by the fact of the WhatsApp messages to her sister and her friend, the arrangements of leaving all her personal belongings and assets in the backpack for her children and her sister after she had passed away, and, of course, upon reading her letter of which she left with the backpack.
The fire, it would appear, was started because of the emotional turmoil she was in as a result of the irretrievable breakdown of her marriage to which her husband, the victim, insisted on having a divorce of which she did not want.
The intention to commit this act in the early hours of the morning after she had been to the hospital to store her assets or belongings in a public housing unit where there are many other people living there is a very serious aggravating factor. As can be seen from the facts, some 80-odd neighbours had to self-evacuate from their flats prior to the arrival of the officers from the Fire Department at around 3.43 am.
Looking at the photographs of the flat after the fire was eventually put out, the flat was completely ruined and burned as a result of this fire. The neighbours must have been extremely scared and alarmed at the degree to which this flat was on fire, as seen from the Summary of Facts, many of whom had been sent to the hospital for smoke inhalation. Notably, the defendant herself had received no injuries nor suffered from what would appear to be any sort of smoke inhalation, so she would have removed herself long before this fire became such an issue.
Another aggravating factor is the fact that when the husband was set alight and there was a fire in the bedroom, the defendant had attempted to block his ( and his mother’s) exit from the flat. It was not until the husband and her mother-in-law had kicked and pulled her away did they manage to escape from the fire in the flat.
A further aggravating factor, in my view, is the harm caused to the victim. The victim impact report is thorough and without going into the details of the report, it can be seen that despite that physical wounds having healed, the husband suffers from post-traumatic syndrome disorder after this tragedy. He has had to change his lifestyle. He has lost his self-esteem and confidence and is unable to return to his occupation of being a chef. I consider this life-threatening tragedy in which the defendant intentionally set fire to him whilst he was asleep to be a serious aggravating factor.
Having considered all these matters, I think an appropriate starting point of 11 years would be appropriate plus an enhancement of 1 year for the aggravating factors which would make a notional starting point of 12 years.
The facts of this case, as I mentioned, are serious. It is most fortunate that nobody or the inhabitants, your mother-in-law and your husband, did not suffer more severely. It appears that the mother-in-law had not suffered at all. But this has had a tremendous impact on your husband to which to this day he denies having any marital affairs. I however accept this what you did was out of character.
What I must accept as well and what appears from the facts of this case is that at the material time as stated by the psychiatrists, you were suffering from a severe depressive episode with psychotic symptoms during the indexed offence. Therefore, this does affect the culpability on you committing this offence in view of your mental illness at the time. Taking that into account, in view of the culpability, I would reduce the starting point by 1 year to that of 11 years.
The strongest mitigating factor in this case, defendant, is your early plea of guilty at the first opportunity. And for that, you shall be awarded the full one-third discount.
And therefore you shall be sentenced to a term of 7 years and 4 months’ imprisonment.