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Zahid Mubarek, 19, was serving the last few hours before his release from a young offenders' institution in Feltham, England — he was serving 90 days for shoplifting a packet of razor blades and interfering with a motor vehicle — when he got attacked by his cell mate.
Unfortunately Mubarek would never get to walk out alive. His cell mate Robert Stewart, 20, a man who many regarded as a racist psychopath, beat him to death with a wooden table leg.
The day before Stewart killed Mubarek he wrote a letter that said, "Did you watch Romper Stomper the other day? Fat film. I wish dem blokes were in and dem what killed Stephen Lawrence. The n****s would soon shut up."
He wasn't the only racist inspired by Romper Stomper, the 1992 film that follows a neo-Nazi group who spent their time attacking Asian immigrants in suburban Melbourne.
Dylann Roof, a self-described white supremacist who killed nine African-American worshippers in a Charleston church, had images from the film on his website that also contained a disturbing racist manifesto.
These incidents added to my sense of unease when I heard that Romper Stomper was going to be reimagined as a TV series by the Australian streaming company Stan.
Same hatred, new target
The six-part drama will continue the story started in the original film 25 years ago, but with some key differences.
This time around the victims of the skinheads are to be Muslim Australians. In the original film the skinheads targeted Asian Australians as they were the enemy de jour. Clearly the producers didn't think that Asian Australians were provocative enough anymore.
And who better to target today than Muslims? Because clearly not enough hate has been generated against Muslims.
Last month the Islamophobia in Australia report highlighted the extent to which Muslims in Australia have come under attack. Nearly 70 per cent of victims were women, and more than 30 per cent of attacks were in front of children, leading some in the community to proclaim: "My kids don't feel safe in their own country."
For many Muslims, it seems that it's not just the far-right who are attacking them — especially if some of our mainstream commentators and newspapers are to go by.
Such whipping of anti-Muslim sentiment has left us feeling further threatened and marginalised.
So is this really the right time to bring a six-part series examining the lives of skinheads who target Muslims to our screens?
Imagined trauma is already real
In the US, an HBO drama series called Confederate has been slated for release. The series looks at an alternate reality where the south has won the civil war and slavery remains legal.
The show came under immediate attack with calls for it to be banned. Author Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in The Atlantic that "Confederate is the kind of provocative thought experiment that can be engaged in when someone else's lived reality really is fantasy to you, when your grandmother is not in danger of losing her vote, when the terrorist attack on Charleston evokes honest sympathy, but inspires no direct fear".
Muslims feel a similar way. When you live with a real fear of being attacked on your way to school, or harassed on a bus, or having your hijab ripped off, the violence isn't something imagined, or a fantasy on your TV screen. It's real. This fear of violence is part of everyday life.
Coates has asked viewers to not give Confederate the benefit of the doubt. Back when Romper Stomper was released, the legendary film reviewer David Stratton did the same.
He famously refused to rate the film, saying: "In these volatile times, with racism on the march again all over the world, this is a dangerous film."
The makers of Romper Stomper the TV series are probably going to be buoyed by such controversy.
Geoffery Wright, the man behind the film and the TV show, said on the show's announcement: "I think we're in more PC times now than in the old days. There's more pressure to not do this, not do that."
"The good old "political correctness gone mad" excuse.
Rather than falling for old tropes maybe it's time we look to the future. Our TV screens certainly need more diverse faces, and not just ones playing victims or terrorists.
We need diverse stories about the many immigrants coming to our shores. We don't need to rehash a story that's already had an outing on the big screen. A story that has the potential to unleash violence on unsuspecting victims who have already been marginalised.
So when it comes to it, will I be watching Romper Stomper the TV series? Like Stratton, I refuse to rate a series I won't be watching, and you probably shouldn't as well.
Saman Shad is a freelance writer.
Topics: television, arts-and-entertainment, race-relations, australia