Industry farewells popular owner-operator Bob Knight, killed in a freak shooting in Sydney last week
By Greg Bush
The trucking industry farewelled popular owner-operator Bob Knight in Canberra over the weekend, who was killed in a freak shooting in Sydney last week.
About 1,000 mourners attended a funeral at the Presbyterian Church in Forrest to pay their respects.
Knight was driving his B-double past a KFC outlet in the Sydney suburb of Milperra at around 10:30pm on June 25 when he was accidentally hit by a .22 calibre bullet during a shootout involving six people in the fast food chain’s car park.
A sub-contractor for around 30 years with TNT, Knight was well liked in the trucking industry.
Brian Castle, Linehaul Operations Manager for TNT, knew Knight as a gentlemen of the industry.
“He used to come out to the yard, get unloaded and load up again and go back down to Canberra. He was a top bloke, a real professional. He’d do anything for you,” Castle recalls.
Castle says all those at TNT who knew Knight are devastated.
“It was really hard for a lot of people to accept, myself especially because I dealt so closely with him,” he says.
Castle says the funeral attracted people from as far away as Brisbane and Melbourne, and included a large contingency from TNT, including senior management.
“Even guys coming back from their trips to Melbourne stopped off on the way through,” he says.
“They packed the church and then they all went back to the German Shepherd Club at Mitchell.”
Knight was a respected breeder and trainer of German shepherds. However, he is well known along the Hume Highway for his impersonations of a woman called ‘Vanessa’ over the UHF. According to Castle, Knight was so convincing that many truckies would pull up, looking for ‘Vanessa’.
“They used to get quite disappointed when they pulled up at a truck stop and found Knighty sitting there,” Castle says.
Bob Knight – father, grandfather and husband to Jeanette – was 66.