Today, social media and the comment sections of news websites seem packed with calls for the parents of the teenagers who died in the basikal lajak tragedy to be hauled to court and be made an example of for other parents. 

“What was your boy doing on the highway at 3am? How did you not know he was not in bed safe and sound?” 

Indeed, how is it that Aminulrasyid’s mother was unaware that her boy was gone? That he had driven off in his sister’s car? Didn’t she know he knew how to drive, at only 14?

And how did the Petaling Jaya middle-class parents remain completely unaware of their only son’s activities all those years? 

How is it that we can find more empathy with these middle-class parents, but fail to do so for the parents of the basikal lajak boys, who died so tragically in this motor accident?

How is it that we so easily say the negligence stems from “unplanned breeding” (ugly words I have heard used to describe large lower-income families), when this could easily happen and has easily happened in better-off and “well-planned” families, too?

Our collective failure

Perhaps in our anguish that a young woman is jailed for something which she seemed to have no control over, we are desperate to find a villain.

In 2019, activist and writer Pang Khee Taik wrote that he agreed the driver was not to be blamed for the incident.

In fact, the blame is on us, the society, for failing to provide safe spaces for children to express themselves and to support lower-income families in nurturing those children, he wrote.

And now, instead of working to remedy this, we want to solve the social issue by criminalising the parents because we think it is just a case of a few bad parents. That it is not our problem. Not our children.

Scathingly, he observed, we see these children “as symptoms of another class, as unproductive pests”.

“And we want to protect our good kids from being harmed by this class,” he wrote.

I am not as eloquent as Pang, but in the same way, these basikal lajak boys reminded me of a teenager whose family I interviewed in their tiny PPR flat a few weeks after he was shot dead by police, from a vantage point.

Police said he was involved in a robbery, but this is disputed by the family. Dead boys cannot defend themselves.

On the night he died, his parents were working late at their tom yam stall next to the flats, from where they saw him playing in the flat compound.

They didn’t realise he was gone until they came home in the wee hours of the morning, to find him missing from his bed. By then, he was already dead.

Should they also be charged for negligence? 

We could be Sam Ke Ting, and we could be the parents

Like many, I am aggrieved by the judgment against Sam Ke Ting. 

She could have been me, driving down a highway within the speed limit, returning home from a late-work assignment, and then chancing upon a group of teenage cyclists who came out of nowhere.

And all the same, those parents could also be me, unaware that my teenage son has snuck out of the home while I was asleep, then awoken by police with the worst news any parent could hear.

In desperately trying to find a villain, perhaps we don’t realise that it is possible that this story only has victims.

They are the young lives extinguished tragically before their time, a young woman just starting out as an adult only to now live with this trauma for the rest of her life whether or not she is jailed, and parents who for all their living years will ask themselves the question, “Why didn’t I know he was out that night?”