I keep playing the scenes over in my head.
First scene: a black boy is inside a lift and a white woman stands outside, talking to the boy before seemingly pressing a button. The doors close, the boy presses more buttons and remains alone, with one of his hands behind his back, playing with a string. A few seconds pass before the doors open again, and the boy gets out of the lift. The woman is not there. We can see the boy open a door to his left, just outside the lift, before the image cuts out.
Next scene: domestic worker Mirtes Santana walks back to her employer’s condo after walking her employer’s dog for 10 minutes. She arrives at the bottom of the building and sees a body lying on the pavement. She screams when she realises the body belongs to Miguel Otávio Santana da Silva, her only child, who was five.
Miguel dies shortly after in hospital from the impact of falling 35 metres – all the way from the ninth floor of a 41-storey luxury condo in Recife, the largest city in northeastern Brazil.
It is any mother’s nightmare: when death takes over what is supposed to be the beginning of life. Tragic you may call it. Structural, I say.
The white woman who didn’t manage to talk Miguel out of the lift is Sari Gaspar, Santana’s employer, the wife of local politician Sérgio Hacker. She was getting a manicure when Miguel entered the lift.
Miguel had gone to work with his mother because she had no other childcare option in times of coronavirus. Reports say that wh…