JAILED: Vincent Tan was sentenced to two-and-a-half years jail and six strokes of the cane.
The maximum penalty for voluntarily causing grievous hurt is life imprisonment, or a jail term of up to 10 years and a fine or caning.
The penalty for entering a house without permission, with the intention of hurting someone, is up to seven years' jail and a fine.

Nice guy

• He courted her by leaving bunches of roses at her front door
  
• Soft-spoken
  
• Polite and quiet

Monster

• He waited outside her school and shouted for her
  
• He called her 20 times a day.
  
• He slept in her flat's corridor.
  
• He shouted her name whenever he saw her at the window.

BY KHOR SU MIN

THE photograph was given to us by the girl with these words: "I don't want it back."

Miss Ng Siow Chin, a 19-year-old student, wants to block out the memories of the last 10 months.

Memories which go back to her first meeting with "this nice guy" in a pub, the good times they had ... and finally the dreadful night of Nov 27 last year when he stabbed her four times.

On that night, Vincent Tan appeared suddenly in her Bukit Panjang flat.

She said: "We all stood up in surprise. Then my father asked him to come to the sitting room and talk it out."

"I turned my back, then I heard my parents and brother shouting, asking me to run." It was too late.

Tan, 32 and unemployed, stabbed her - twice in the abdomen, and once each on the upper left arm and left loin.

Recalled Miss Ng: "I saw my mum, dad, and brother trying to pull him away from me...I just lay on the floor."

An ambulance took Miss Ng to National University Hospital.

As she lay on the operating table, soon after his attack, he called up her best friend.

Said Miss Ng: "He asked her if I was dead. And should he send any flowers?"

But Tan was so different when she first met him in a Bukit Timah pub early last year.

"He was soft-spoken and polite and he didn't talk very much."

He left roses at her front door. Miss Ng asked her friend to check Tan out. Her friend gave the go-ahead.

Tan and Miss Ng started going out, meeting once or twice a week for meals at a food court or hawker centre. Once a month they would watch a movie.

Two or three times a week, he would visit her at home. When she did her homework, he would watch TV or just do nothing.

Miss Ng began to get irritated.

"I couldn't study with him staring at my face doing nothing."

She wanted to end the relationship. That's when he began to turn into a monster.

He used foul language. He stubbed his tongue with cigarettes. He even threatened to kill her if she broke off with him.

Ng finally snapped the 10-month-old relationship in October last year.

Her nightmare continued. Tan began to sleep in her flat's corridor.

"I felt scared, I didn't dare step out of the house. My brother and sister had to buy lunch for me," she said.

The fear persists, although Tan was jailed for two-and-a-half years yesterday.

She said: "I am afraid he will come back for me."

HOW HE WAS CAUGHT

TAN was caught when he turned up at the National University Hospital on Nov 28, the same night he stabbed Ms Ng.

Ms Tan's aunt saw him in the lift and yelled for the police.

Tan has previous convictions for theft and molest, and has been in drug rehabilitation centres before.