Warning: Graphic content
Kyree Bathurst’s bartending shift started like any other.
It ended with a drunk and aggressive customer holding her head in one hand and smashing a schooner glass into her face with the other, causing a serious injury that required urgent five-hour surgery.
The only “provocation”, which a judge ruled as unjustified, was Bathurst’s attempt to stop her attacker, Filo Aiga, from yelling and swearing at the woman he was with at the bar.
Aiga, 30, was jailed for 4½ years with a non-parole period of 2½ years for the attack at the Kogarah Tavern in southern Sydney two years ago.
A traumatised Bathurst, enduring the emotional and physical scarring of his attack, believes he should have received a harsher punishment.
“I might never get my life back,” Bathurst told the Herald.
“And he just gets to walk free after a couple of years”.
Kyree Bathurst suffered a serious face injury from the attack.
Her comments follow Aiga’s failed attempt to appeal his penalty and receive a shorter jail sentence last week.
Court documents and CCTV footage obtained by this masthead outline Bathurst’s frightening experience at 2am on June 2, 2022.
She was behind the bar at the Kogarah Tavern, where Aiga and Samantha Buckland, a manager at the hotel who had finished working there several hours earlier, were drinking.
Aiga and Buckland were in an intimate relationship.
Aiga vomited at the bar, causing Buckland to ask him to go home and stop embarrassing her at her workplace. Instead, he called her a “dog” and kept yelling as he knocked over two nearby bar stools and threw his workbag and hard hat.
Wanting to defend Buckland, Bathurst said to Aiga: “Big strong boy, you felt like a big man yelling at a girl, weak dog”.
An incensed Aiga grabbed a schooner sitting on the bar and threw the beer at Bathurst.
He then reached across the bar, placed one hand on the right side of Bathurst’s head and smashed the empty glass into the left side of her face.
The glass shattered just above her left eyebrow, leaving her bleeding profusely.
Describing her immediate shock, Bathurst said she didn’t initially realise her face was cut.
“It wasn’t until I looked around and the whole bar was covered in blood [that I realised], like there was blood everywhere,” she said.
Bathurst required a five-hour surgery to treat her injuries.
Bathurst was rushed to hospital where she underwent a marathon surgery to treat her gaping wound and has been left with permanent scarring.
Beyond the physical impacts, Bathurst has not been able to return to the hospitality industry she loved working in, and the anxiety from living in a busy city forced her to move to a regional NSW town.
“I really love bar work, and to not be able to do it is tough,” she said.
Given the way Aiga held her face, Bathurst felt he should have been convicted of the more serious charge of grievous bodily harm with intent as opposed to the charge of recklessly causing grievous bodily harm, to which he pleaded guilty.
According to the National Alcohol and Drug Knowledgebase, 21 per cent of Australians aged 14 years and over had experienced at least one incident of either physical abuse, verbal abuse or being put in fear by someone under the influence of alcohol in the past 12 months.
In Aiga’s case, the court heard he is a repeat offender, with a 10-year criminal history peppered with property, affray and driving offences.
As well as his current prison sentence, he had stints in jail in 2014, 2015 and 2016.
While in custody on remand for the glassing, Aiga was charged with possessing an offensive weapon after he made a 22-centimetre blade. He was sentenced to a further four months in jail.
Last week, Aiga tried to appeal his glassing sentence in the NSW Supreme Court, arguing the sentencing judge erred in making findings that were not available on the evidence, including that Bathurst’s laceration was life-threatening but for surgical intervention.
He also argued the sentence was manifestly excessive and that the judge erred in assessing the seriousness of the offence and not reducing his moral culpability due to mental illness.
Justice Natalie Adams, Justice Mark Ierace and Justice Deborah Sweeney dismissed the appeal, upholding only the non-life threatening argument.
“Even if there was no evidence before the court that the injuries were life-threatening, they were serious, required surgery, and have left permanent facial scarring,” the appeal judgment read.
“A photograph of the injury was in evidence and shows the extent of it and the proximity to the victim’s eye”.
The judges said Bathurst was simply doing her job and was “forced to deal with an aggressive intoxicated patron”.
“She was entitled to feel safe in her place of employment. This was serious criminality”.
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