It's the small details that play over and over again in the mind. The CCTV footage of Damilola Taylor skipping across the pavement outside the library in Peckham just like any other exuberant 10-year-old, the broad grin on his face at the end of the school day and the spot of his blood on a broken bottle.
The senseless killing of this Nigerian boy last week as he walked home from school in London, dying in a dirty stairwell yards from his home on a "tough" estate, has turned the spotlight on a frightened community.
Within days of Damilola's murder, the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, had focused on law and order problems in major British cities, attacking the "walk-on-by" mentality, urging the community to create a society where "people do not run away from anything".
Politicians suggested policies to encourage families to stay together must be introduced. Labour and Conservative politicians alike called for the recruitment of more police officers to housing estates to combat crime.
Damilola's murder has also brought debate on other issues that British society is genuinely trying to address. Were his killers the same children he told his mother had bullied him at school, calling him gay and teasing him because he was a good student?
Were they part of a gang culture borrowed from the US, stalking the streets for someone to attack? Or was Damilola's murder a feature of blackon-black racism that has gone unnoticed in the wake of the Macpherson report into the killing of Stephen Lawrence?
Once Damilola's teachers at the Oliver Goldsmith primary school discounted theories about bullying - a factor his family insist they cannot dismiss - gang culture and racism were put forward as possible reasons for his murder.
But most commentators counselled against rushing to judgment. Railing against dumping more young black boys into the "gang" category, the editor of the Independent on Sunday, Janet Street-Porter, wrote this week: "I have listened to people on television and the radio complaining about an alleged rise in American-style gangs among the young, as if this explains why young Damilola Taylor may have been bullied at school. The idea that more young black people are hanging out in threatening gangs is a subtle form of racism."
Writing in the London Evening Standard on Monday, the commentator, Hugh Muir, condemned the naivety of a "Klondike rush" to debate the so-called new racism of black-on-black.
Damilola may have been killed by boys of West Indian origin, a community which, we are informed, harbours people with a murderous dislike of Nigerians.
Such naivety, Mr Muir commented, would be laughable if the events that triggered it were not so tragic: "Just when will we grow up and have a sensible debate about race?"
Mr Muir argues that a feeling among white people that they are being held solely responsible for the evil of racism is hampering the debate on race.
"I have lost count of the number of people who tell me that an anti-white, anti-racist witch-hunt triggered by the Lawrence inquiry has gone too far," Mr Muir said. "They say the finger of suspicion is destroying our institutions; our language is being neutered, our customs trashed and our police cannot police. The message from the malcontents is `You see, it is not just us, folks'. "
Damilola Taylor was a talented, aspirational ambitious boy from Lagos catapulted on to a sink estate in south-east London. No one yet knows why he was killed or to what extent race, social exclusion or some other factor played a part in his murder.
The north Peckham estate where Damilola Taylor died was undergoing a period of regeneration and crime was falling so the answers may not easily be found there.
The sad reality is that society couldn't protect an immigrant child hoping for a new life in London.
rdonnelly@irish-times.ie