A Palestinian man ( wearing pink) with his friends sitting on the stairs of closed shops in the Al Amari refugee camp south of Ramallah .
It was the THUMP that reached me.
Sitting in a cafe on the upper level of a new Ramallah shopping mall, my cappuccino had just arrived and I was finishing off an email on my BlackBerry when I heard it. THUMP.
It sounded as if someone had just dropped a very large bundle of newspapers on the marble floor 10 or 12 meters below. Looking down from my perch I could make out someone lying on the ground in front of half a dozen ATMs from various Arab banks.
Poor fellow, I thought, he must have slipped when he came in from the rain. He must really have fallen hard to make a sound like that.
I put on my glasses and saw more clearly that it was a young man of about 15, and someone was trying to help him up. The young man, however, was not even trying to get up and the helper recoiled in horror.
He lay the man's head back down, and I could make out quite clearly now that a dark red halo was radiating out around the man's head. His body didn't move.
Shouts went out for assistance; the helper grabbed someone's coat and tried to press it against the back of the man's head; a security guard ran over and called on his walkie-talkie for someone to please come, quickly.
More people gathered round; the reality set in. The young man was dead.
He had somehow tumbled from the top floor onto the marble below. The way he landed suggested he had taken a slow front roll in the air and his head had hit at about the same moment as his back and legs.
I couldn't recall hearing him yell or scream – just the thump.
There was no one near the spot from which he had fallen but, walking by later to leave the building, I noticed that the railing leading onto the down escalator was dangerously low, not even waist high. It would never have passed Western safety standards.
Maybe the young man thought he saw someone he knew – or someone he wanted to get to know – and leaned over.
As he lay there, a distraught older man came over, then, recognizing the boy as his son, he wailed in grief and wanted to tear his own flesh. Strangers held his arms, held him back, consoled him.
For years, Palestinian parents worried about their sons getting involved in political movements, demonstrating, protesting, fighting the Israeli occupation. They worried every day their sons might not come home.
But now, as such days recede in memory, parents don't worry quite so much. Life is better now, the economy is growing; malls stand where rubble once lay.
Just when things looked promising, this young man was not coming home.
I thought of how the father must feel, and I called my own young son in Toronto; woke him up, just to hear his voice and to tell him always to be careful.