After he was killed, Chris Taylor's daughter drove to a baseball field and cried in her car.
She was pregnant and wanted to feel close to him as realisation hit that he would never meet his first grandchild.
The 45-year-old was stabbed to death during a random attack at a Melbourne home in September 2021.
Tanisha Lovell finally confronted her father's killer, Darryl Kennedy, during a Supreme Court hearing in Melbourne on Thursday.
"You took half of me away," she said, crying over video link.
"You never just had one victim that day ... Every person who ever loved him, cared for him or even knew him, became a victim too."
Kennedy, 44, had been bingeing on booze and valium with his girlfriend the night before the killing.
He was then kicked out of his partner's house due to an unpaid loan.
Kennedy's father picked him up from a supermarket and drove him to a Bayswater North property where he once lived.
The owner owed Kennedy a few hundreds dollars, so he figured he could stay there.
But when he got inside the home, he chose violence.
Kennedy confronted Mr Taylor, who was renting at the property, and stabbed him to death with a fish filleting knife.
Mr Taylor ran into the backyard, where he cried out to a neighbour over the fence for help.
He was staggering with blood on his face and tripped on a tarpaulin before falling against a ute in the backyard.
Kennedy told the neighbour: "It's none of your business, don't get involved."
He then said the property owner owed him $400 and: "Let this be a lesson for you, I'm going to jail for murder."
Kennedy walked to a nearby McDonald's, where police saw him throw the murder weapon into a bin and he was arrested.
Emergency services were called and Mr Taylor was declared dead at the scene.
Ms Lovell said the first anniversary of her father's death was worse than the day he died.
"Now the reality has sunk in that because of a monster, who is still alive and breathing, who has caused an unexplainable pain, my dad is not here," she told the court.
Kennedy pleaded guilty to manslaughter and faced a pre-sentence hearing on Thursday.
His barrister Ashley Halphen said the stabbing was spontaneous and happened during a fight between the two men.
He said Kennedy, who suffered a long history of drug abuse, had not planned to stab Mr Taylor when he arrived at the home and did not bring the knife with him.
But prosector Mark Rochford was critical that there was a "complete lack of explanation" as to why he stabbed Mr Taylor.
"A man has lost his life in circumstances where there was apparently no reason for it to happen," he said.
Justice Michael Croucher will sentence Kennedy next week.
