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Incident

Continuing and accumulated grievances against police brutality since the start of the anti-ELAB protests led to doxing of police officers and calls for revenge. Private details of a police officer's wedding in Tseung Kwan O on 3 November 2019 were thus leaked, and calls were made to crash it. Around 16:00 on that day, the police dispersed protesters who were disrupting the wedding held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Riot police arrived near the hotel about two hours later. Then, around 00:20 on 4 November, around 100 protesters gathered at the junction of Tong Ming and Tong Chun streets, with some creating roadblocks.

Early 4 November, a 22-year-old second-year computer science undergraduate student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Chow Tsz-Lok, sustained severe head injuries due to a fall from the third to the second storey of the Sheung Tak car park in Tseung Kwan O, near an area of confrontation between protesters and police. According to his father, Chow, also known as Alex Chow, had left their flat at around 23:40 on 3 November 2019, wearing a black top, deep-grey shorts, black running shoes, a black cap, and a dark backpack. Chow did not disclose to his family where he was going.

CCTV footage showed that Chow was wandering alone, backwards and forwards between the inside the car park and on a connecting footbridge from 0:26 until 01:02 – the last moment he was captured on camera. The fall itself was not captured in the footage due to the operational camera rotations and parked vehicles blocking the view.

The police said that they fired tear gas in the area near the car park from 00:41 to 00:57. As reported in the Time magazine, it was initially unclear whether or not the tear gas, fired near the car park where protesters and officers clashed, had played a role in Chow's fall. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer said that television footage showed police had fired tear gas at the building in which Chow fell "minutes earlier". Tear gas was reported at the junction of Tong Ming Street and Tong Chun Street, to the western side of the car park, on the opposite side of the building and about 120 metres (parallel to the building) to 160 metres (from the junction) away from the spot where Chow fell. Security footage released by the building owner Link REIT showed that there was no police presence nor significant amounts of tear gas inside the car park in the moments before Chow fell.

At a press conference on 6 November, Police said they believed the victim had fallen between 0.45 am and 1 am and that officers first entered the ground floor of the car park at 1.05 am and gradually moved up to disperse protesters, and when the casualty was found at 1.11 am, firefighters were already present. However, video footage released by the Citizen News showed that riot police officers were walking out of the staircase entrance of Sheung Tak Car Park as as early as 11:28 pm on the 3rd. and that the riot police officers had entered the car park two whole hours earlier, contradicting the police's claim. Similarly, a reader video released by Apple Daily shows that police officers were already present in the car park at around 11:15 pm.

The police stated that officers conducted a dispersal operation in the building late Sunday, from 23:06 until 23:20, before Chow had arrived there. A second operation, to disperse protesters who had allegedly been throwing objects at officers on the street from above, took place at 01:05 after Chow had been found unconscious. Police denied that there were any police officers inside the building when Chow was walking around there, nor did they chase after him before he fell. The police concluded their dispersal operation in the car park at 01:25 and in the nearby area around the Sheung Tak car park at 01:45.

At 01:05, police were informed by a civilian that a person had fallen. Firefighters attending to the injured requested an ambulance at 01:11. At 01:15, as seen in CCTV footage, over 20 police officers arrived at the spot where Chow had fallen and left about a minute later. Suzette Foo, the Senior Superintendent (Operations) of Kowloon East, said that their officers learned about Chow's injuries when they reached the second floor as they swept the building from the ground floor. She said that the firefighters told the police that they had the situation under control and did not require their presence. The police then dispersed the people at the scene with weapons, and left the first-aiders alone to provide care.

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