‘Underworld figure shot in our basement carpark at 10.30 this morning,’ My sister wrote to the family WhatsApp thread. ‘Cops everywhere. All ok. Just thankful I wasn’t down there like I planned to be. (Was going to drive to the gym at 10.15, glad I was lazy!).’
She lives in Preston, where Sam ‘the Punisher’ Abdulrahim was murdered under the fluorescents of an underground carpark while walking to his car with his girlfriend, who presumably lives in the same block as my sister. It was the sort of thing most of us read about in headlines and then file away under ‘someone else’s trouble’. Yet here it was, right beneath my sister’s apartment, on the same route she would have taken to the gym.
On the family thread, a couple of us sent that surprised-looking emoji with a little circle for a mouth, which might be both a little infantilising for such a serious event, but perhaps appropriate in illustrating something about the difficulties of responding to stories where, in the Venn diagram of ‘regular mundane world’ and ‘strange world of violence’, there’s an unexpected overlap.
In Australia, often touted as one of the world’s safest and most successful liberal democracies, this sort of sudden, brutal violence still feels like an aberration, (despite Carl Williams and his ilk dominating headlines for years). So I suppose it’s not exactly a once-in-a-generation event. Nor is it unique to Victoria: just last week, police in Sydney discovered a hefty bomb in a caravan, allegedly with a list of Jewish targets.
We compartmentalise these events. What else can we do? Maybe we speak of them as though they take place in a grimy parallel world that doesn’t intrude on our own. But I don’t know. When my sister’s apartment basement became a crime scene, that distinction feels a little less secure.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure how else to respond beyond relief. Huh! Good thing she wasn’t shot! I’m thankful my sister wasn’t in the basement at the time. But I also had the uncharitable thought that perhaps the victim, a violent underworld figure whose criminal convictions go back to 2009, had perhaps done something to deserve it. I read later he was linked to the 2016 assassination of a rival crime boss. And yet that sense of he probably had it coming is no good either, given an essential part of what makes this country largely free from people being shot to