Savagery of a single blow to the head

Matthew Coley sounds like a thoughtful guy.

The 40-year-old’s family describe a quiet man. A keen writer who liked heavy discussions.

Quite possibly, then, he’d have been up for devoting some attention to the problem of youth violence.

Instead he’s drawn attention to it, in the worst way.

Coley was the victim of a fatal king-hit from a 16-year-old kid outside the Invercargill Night’ N Day in the small hours of April 9.

He’d been drinking but was entirely passive, unthreatening. It was his assailant Tyrone Palmer, after consuming alcohol, LSD and cannabis, who in his folly was described in court as ‘‘spoiling for some sort of confrontation’’.

An out-of-it kid who was physically large enough to kill Coley with a single punch to the head. Which isn’t terribly hard to do.

Coley’s bereft family is now trying, as best it can, to engage public attention in the problem of youth violence.

It’s an issue that has already been much-discussed; with weight and disapproval among the ranks of adult professionals, and for that matter with teacher-pleasing student gravity in the schools of the land.

Nowadays there’s an encouragement to refer not to king-hits, but to coward punches, so that people can see them for what they are.

The king hit is already widely considered to be cowardly. And it is.

But it clearly doesn’t feel so, in the moment, to the puffy, pissed, emotionally juvenile types who have been delivering these blows for the momentary gratification it seems to offer them.

The high profile that is nowadays given to the hideous consequences these out-of-the-blue assaults can have for the victims, and to some extent for the offenders, has reached the stage that it is increasingly unimpressive for people to stand, head bowed, in court and explain that they just didn’t know this could happen.

But it’s one thing to know it before you indulge the urge. Or after.

Quite another for it to matter in that moment when you just so completely feel like it.

The thought needs to be strongly in their heads that this is a dirty, dangerous, low thing to do.

But even this is an inadequate approach. To baptise a coward’s punch is to suggest that it may have been okay if the victim had been given warning and the chance to fight back first.

As if it’s okay as long as the other guy was looking. Which it isn’t. Ask the judges. And the families of the dead.