'Keith Collins was killed in a Westfield. But it would have been normal if he was killed at home.'

Early headlines called it a “love triangle” gone wrong.

A man and woman on their first date in a busy Korean Restaurant were stabbed as they ate dinner. The 53-year-old father of two was killed and the 39-year-old mother of three injured. The alleged attacker was the woman’s ex partner. Jovi Pilapil had separated from her husband,  Alexander Villaluna, last November and had an AVO out on him. On New Year’s Day on Facebook she had posted a message: “New Year, New Beginnings!!!”.

Violence was her new beginning and violence was the end for Keith Collins, a businessman, reportedly very active in his local community in Terrigal on the Central Coast. A man who probably put on a nice shirt on Wednesday early evening and traveled down to Sydney to see if he might have a chance at love again.

A love triangle?

There was no love triangle. There was a domestic violence incident played out under the fluoro lights of a Westfield Shopping Centre.

You can watch Channel 7’s report on the incident below. Post continues after video. 

There is video footage for us all to see of a policewoman arresting a man. He kneels on the floor between restaurant tables, hands bloody and behind his head. The policewomen aims a taser at his head, yells instructions and then cuffs him.

Eye witnesses stare down cameras and recount the violence that happened right next to them as they sat eating dinner. Someone thought it was a terrorist attack and yelled that the alleged attacker might have a bomb in his backpack and to stay away.

A teenage boy says to a camera that after the murder victim had been stabbed in the neck and chest and was lying bleeding and dying on the restaurant floor yelling for help, the alleged attacker came after him again with the knife.

A reporter asks if he had ever seen anything like this before.

“Nah,” he says shaking his head, a mouth still full of braces.

After the alleged attack, the man walked away “eerily calm”.

All these lives torn apart in five minutes. A father of two dead. His children and friends and family never the same. A woman always running and never able to hide from an ex-partner. Her children and friends and family never the same. The witnesses. The police. In shock, traumatised, scared, changed forever.

That’s a lot of people involved in a “love triangle”. That’s a lot of people at the centre of a “lover’s quarrel”.

We all know who Keith Collins and Jovi Pilapil are today. A man was stabbed to death simply because he sat opposite a woman he had met on a dating website. And Jovi Pilapil, is a woman stabbed simply because of who she once fell in love with.

The reasons we look and know these two is because what happened to them didn’t play out like it normally does. Every week in Australia, one woman is killed by her partner. In private. Behind closed doors. Yelling coming through windows. Sudden banging. Neighbours wondering if they should do anything and what would happen if they did do something. If they did knock on the door and say, “Is everything alright here?”

Family members asking about that awful split lip on a daughter’s/sister’s/aunty’s/mother’s face and believing when she berates her silly self and says it was from ‘tripping up the stairs and falling awkwardly’. Women too scared to talk. Children knowing they cannot talk. Women blaming themselves. Stuck in a cycle of loving abuse.

That boy with the braces was not standing in the kitchen as his father pulled a knife on his mother. The diners at the restaurant, weren’t sitting at Jovi Pilapil’s dining room table. The shoppers at Westfield weren’t staring in through the open windows of a three bedroom home witnessing yet another act of domestic violence.

That violence, that someone in the Korean Restaurant warned could be terrorism, is part of every day life for too many women and children.

This time, a man has died violently and so sadly because he put on a nice shirt and went on a date with a woman.

This time everyone saw that violence is violence, no matter what the relationship is between the victim and the perpetrator.

This time everyone saw what happens too often in Australia – behind closed doors.