In the early morning hours of September 21, a foreign man was killed at the intersection of Điện Biên Phủ and Đinh Tiên Hoàng Streets in District 1. A week after the accident, new details have emerged which tell a different story than what was first reported in the local media.
Initial reports said that the victim, who has since identified as 24-year-old, Otavio Fleury, was speeding shirtless down the one-way section of Đinh Tiên Hoàng Street and that after swerving to avoid an oncoming motorbike, he drove onto the sidewalk and into a wall, dying upon impact.
However, “An ice deliveryman who claimed to have witnessed the accident said Fleury was making a legal right turn from Dien Bien Phu to Dinh Tien Hoang, but did so at a reckless speed. The deliveryman, who refused to give his name, denied earlier media accounts that suggested Fleury wasn't wearing a shirt or had driven in the wrong direction. He and several other neighbors gathered to recall the “handsome young foreigner” believed Fleury must have been intoxicated,” reports Thanh Nien.
Not only was he likely wearing a shirt (“Friends say the impact blew his white t-shirt up around his neck.”), but an initial autopsy report, “made no mention of drugs or alcohol and cited the trauma of the crash as the cause of his death.”
The eyewitness accounts of the accident may also be questionable given that, “a group of locals said few were awake to see what caused Fleury to clip the motorbike of a 27 year-old Mekong Delta man named Tran Hoang Giao.”
Calvin Godfrey over at Thanh Nien does an excellent job of interviewing friends to paint a clearer picture of who Fleury was – a hardworking, big-thinking, happy-go-lucky young man – and the circumstances surrounding his accident.
