The senseless death of a teenager, hit by an office chair that was thrown from 20 stories above, has taken up a considerable amount of news discourse this week.
One of the more shocking elements in an already tragic story was a witness account that it was commonplace for varying objects, including furniture, to be thrown from the windows and balconies of the Seri Pantai low-cost housing buildings.
Two-days ago, a general worker tending to the grounds in and around the Putra Ria Apartments in Jalan Bangsar lived to tell the tale of a flying steel chair from above that narrowly missed his head.
Azmi was sweeping the futsal court on the lower ground floor when a chair landed a hairline away from him. He told reporters from The Star that he suspects that the object was thrown from the 10th or 12th floor of Block 91, one of the four buildings in the complex.
Speaking to reporters divulging only his first name, he spoke of the types of rubbish he finds on a daily basis: discarded shopping trollies, toys, soiled napkins, condoms, and even human turds inside paper bags – all thrown from the floors above.
Right before the chair struck the floor, Azmi witnessed a box containing rubbish and clothing being thrown. As he was about to clean up the mess, he heard a scream, and the chair landed next to him.
“My heart was racing when I realized that it had missed my head by mere inches,” he said.
Angry that someone could have been so careless, he went to investigate, but the culprits remained mum. Another resident told him they had heard a domestic dispute, and that the chair had been thrown in anger.
A terrifying state of affairs when fellow citizens do not realize that their recklessness could equal murder. When did we lose all common sense? Was it before 2017, or did this just happen quietly?
Earlier this month, a viral post hinted that the issue was not isolated: a cleaner in a Shah Alam block of flats was caught red-handed throwing objects that included metal bars, cooking appliances and chairs from a fourth-floor balcony.
The Star describes many of these low-cost units have no trash chutes, and that the lower-income occupants had little time to descend 16 to 20 floors to throw away their rubbish.
Ah, sorry Star – you’ve lost us here. Which part of the day makes it impossible to take five minutes to do your duty, and throw your rubbish in the proper receptacle? We’re pretty certain that even Bill Gates has five minutes of his life to spare, so what’s anyone’s excuse?
Unattended children can be spotted playing alone around the complex, while reporters witnessed a young girl playing dangerously close to the window ledge when they visited the Putra Ria flats.
Azmi described one particularly terrible incident where an apartment resident was hit by a paper bag filled with cat feces. Cat feces. Cat. Feces.
Items such as old furniture, radios, pots and pans dotted the corridors.
Cleaning staff at other low-cost flats report that residents there are often too lazy to dispose of their rubbish in the common garbage room, and would often leave rotting waste in communal corridors for workers to take down.
This is where we’re at people: Wasting time and energy to find out if some lady is perhaps transgender, instead of expending it to re-educate our populace of the lost art of common sense.
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