“It wasn’t a high speed chase. The boy’s car seemed to be cruising at maybe 60kph and the police car was right behind his, firing at the car,” says a waiter at one of the restaurants who witnessed the incident.
By Sheridan Mahavera, The Malaysian Insider
By most accounts there was nothing eye-catching about him. Not the way he spoke, how he ribbed his friends or how he dressed.
Aminulrasyid Amzah was quite simply a quiet, diminutive 14-year-old schoolboy, according to those who lived around him and who saw him last.
If he was part of your school-yard group, he would have been one of the followers. Not the one everyone bullied but certainly not the one with the zaniest jokes, the one who got all the girls’ phone numbers or the one who shaped opinions.
He is remembered as being a part of the many regular groups of schoolboys who roamed the neighbourhood after class. Who ate out with their families at the community’s food court and who haunted the cybercafés.
In essence, he was part of the scenery of Shah Alam’s Section 11. One of this Malay-Muslim city’s oldest neighbourhoods and which is known for its seamless mix of working class and upscale houses.
That is what has rankled many in Section 11 — that others are trying to force them to believe something which they feel they know as intimately as their backyards.
It is not just that his death is a tragedy; it is also the conflicting reports surrounding it.
What the authorities say happened on the day clashes with the accounts of eye-witnesses who saw the boy’s car being chased and peppered with bullets, and who saw how the wreck sat in the drain.
And then there is the part about him being called an armed robber.
According to those who saw him last that day and night, some of them who also saw the car chase, it would be a stretch to believe he was a hardcore criminal who had to be put down.
One resident, who attended the boy’s burial prayers and who knew the family, summarised the sentiment succinctly:
“This did not happen in some oil palm estate or some jungle. It happened in Section 11. People saw it and people here are not easily fooled”.
