Picture of pain: The man behind the photo
When Rami Al got a phone call that there had been a shooting at his mosque in Christchurch, he ran out the front door, shirtless, shoeless and his phone fixed to his ear.
His father was in the Masjid Al Noor for Friday prayers.
Al, 29, had planned to join him and was changing out of his work clothes when the shootings started in the mosque.
It is usually a 20-minute drive from his Bishopdale home to the mosque in Riccarton but he got there in five minutes. He drove with one hand, calling his father’s mobile phone again and again without success.
“Your father’s been shot,” a friend’s dad told him when he arrived at Deans Ave, where a police cordon was in place and dead bodies could be seen on the footpath. Police officers threatened to arrest him three times as he insisted on getting into the mosque.
Al rang his father again and this time got through. His speech slurred, he said he had been shot and was trapped under two bodies.
Unable to get past police, Al retreated to a bench in Hagley Park to comfort his father until ambulance officers could be let in.
At that moment he was photographed by an Associated Press photographer. The picture of a shirtless, nameless man, his face flushed with grief, became one of the defining images of the mosque shootings.
The photograph — which was published in the Weekend Herald and in newspapers around the world — captured the personal grief of the attacks and the chaos in the immediate aftermath of the shootings.
Until now, Al has been too traumatised to talk about that afternoon.
“I felt very helpless, the most helpless time in my life really,” he told the Weekend Herald at his home in northwest Christchurch.
“I couldn’t help my dad while he was bleeding out. “It really hit me hard,” he said.
“As strong as I thought I can be, or anything, just hearing my dad like that on the phone just really destroyed me that day.”
His father didn’t know where or how much of the blood on him was his own.
“He kept telling me, ‘I’m feeling tired, I’m dozing off, I might go to sleep’, and I was saying please keep talking to me, and he was like, ‘My tongue is getting really heavy and quite numb’. I tried to stay on the phone with him the entire time. He was crying, yelling, trying to get some help.”
His father suffered serious nerve damage and is one of the few injured victims still in hospital.
“Spiritually, he’s good, but mentally he’s probably a bit down being hospitalised at the moment. We keep telling him, ‘You made it at least’,” Al said.
Originally from Palestine, the family moved to New Zealand 21 years ago.
Their situation highlights the long, scarred aftermath of the attack for victims and their families. Doctors at Burwood Hospital say he won’t walk for at least six months and may never fully recover.
“My dad has always been a very strong man so it’s been hard to see him like this.
“He keeps apologising for some reason, and we keep telling him, ‘Dad, it’s you who’s been shot’.”
Al is too traumatised to return to his work as a milk distributor for Meadowfresh.
He lost two close friends in the shootings, Hussein Al-Umari and Atta Ellayan, and he can’t bring himself to go back to Al Noor for prayers yet, meaning he has been cut off from his faith community.
He imports cars from Japan on the side and his favourite hobby is restoring old cars to factory condition.
His pet project was a 1979 Vauxhall Bedford campervan which he spent six years fixing up.
It was stolen two weeks after the shootings and police have been unable to find it.
At the urging of his family, Al has decided to take a break.
On Monday, he sets off on a world trip, starting off in Bali before meeting a friend in Nepal and taking in India and Southeast Asia and then a family reunion in Jordan, where his mother is from.
“It’ll be hard to leave my family but I need to get out of Christchurch and be in a different atmosphere for a while.”