“DADDY, it’s a Rolls Royce, really it’s a Rolls Royce! I see it outside my school…

Car spotting was something young Zech enjoyed doing while out driving around with his parents. And if his father TS Loh wasn’t with him, he would send him a voice message telling his Dad of the car he had spotted.

“I would get several of these messages a day and they would keep me entertained,” Loh says as he continued to scroll his messages on the phone for more of these voice messages. He would smile to himself and could sometimes lip sync to Zech’s words as he must have heard them umpteen times.

Zech was his 7-year-old chatty and active lad who was on the go from the moment he woke up in the morning till he went to sleep at night. “Since the day he was born, he tagged along with us wherever we went. Especially to the orang asli settlements where he found great joy playing in the stream and made friends with the kids there.”

“From the day we delivered our son to this world,” Zech’s mother Tan Ei Ein recalls “he was so precious to us that we decided we would care for him on our own since we both work from home.

“I always long to be with him and would try to finish my work to be with him. We would let him tag along to our meetings and when we have meetings with corporate clients we would park him with our friends for a while.

“(He was) Very good boy, would play quietly by himself. It was just enjoyable for us to have him along. It was always like us having an adventure together,” Loh’s wife reminisces.

Each adventure with Zech was a new chapter in their journey with the precocious child until it all shattered when they lost him at the Batang Kali landslide a year ago on Dec 16.

Today Loh and Ei Ein grapple to use whatever video, voice messages and photos they have to help them piece together memories and moments spent with their only child before they were all taken away.

The disaster, one of the most tragic in the country, continues to haunt them but by sharing their poignant experiences of that night they hope to help others who may suffer similar grief in the future or even push authorities for more stringent measures to prevent the recurrence of such a tragedy.

That fateful night

“It was the second night (at Father’s Organic Farm), on Dec 16 at 2.08am. I was sleeping in a tent and my wife and son were sleeping in the car away from me. There were 3 sections at the farm – Hill view at the top, Farm View in the middle and River View at the lower ground. They were the first to be hit by the landslide and it missed my tent.

“When I first heard the rumbling, it sounded like a car moving very fast. I thought to myself, this is a campsite and no car would come at night. The sound grew louder and louder. I felt something was not right, I sat up and looked out my tent and saw the tree line shifting. In less than 10 seconds, there was a loud thunder-like sound when the landslide first hit. A lump of soil flew past and landed in my tent. Immediately I went out of the tent and moved quickly towards the direction of my wife and son.

“I passed by our friend Quek’s tent that had partially collapsed and he was trapped inside the tent. He was struggling to get out and I managed to free him and his family by tearing open the tent. After that, I went farther and I saw the lady teacher stuck in the soil sideways.

“I removed the soil from her nose and mouth and I told her – you can breathe already. And I went forward stepping on the soft soil and found myself knee-deep in mud that hampered my movement. I managed to get onto a collapsed hut and shone my torch light to look for everyone. I saw a few cars had been pushed aside by the soil but I could not see my car. It didn’t occur to me that the rest of the cars had been buried. I thought the slide only hit a few cars.

“I saw one boy, one of the teachers’ sons, was trapped – half body covered. I shouted to him and he responded.  I went back to the group of people who had gathered and I went looking for a certain spot at Hill view where there was phone reception to call 991. The teachers (tents) were the worst hit. They suffered the worst from the impact.

“After calling emergency and telling them what had happened, I communicated through Whatsapp with Bomba Pahang. I told them to google and search for the place. I also told them how many people were involved  and for them to come fast.

“Many of us were in a state of shock. We couldn’t do much. The camp operator was also injured. There were also so many kids with us. Occasionally we could hear a car horn. I thought it must be her (Ei Ein) because they were the only ones who slept in the car.

“Throughout the night all kinds of thoughts were racing through my mind when I heard the car horn. I thought: could she be in a critical condition and felt that she probably couldn’t make it so she kept pressing the horn. And my son, they was no sound from him to indicate he was still alive. He would otherwise be shouting and screaming. Finally my thoughts landed on the possibility of carrying on life alone….how will I do that?”

“Earlier in the first night I had gone over to the car to check on them and to say goodnight. As I was walking away, Zech gestured to me to come back and he stretched out his arms for a hug.

“I gave him a hug before returning to my tent. That was the last time I hugged him”.

Tan Ei Ein

“My son and I slept in the car because car camping was a trend so we got some gears and it was our first time car camping.

“I heard a loud noise and I sat up to see what was happening. But before I could see anything, in a split second I blacked out. It felt like 30 minutes later when I woke up, it was pitch dark and I couldn’t sit up. I groped around with my hands and felt one of Zech’s feet and I held on to it. My foot landed on the steering wheel and I could horn, and alert those outside. I was desperate, I kept pressing at the horn with my foot. From then on, Loh shouted to me and told me to conserve my energy and to stop pressing the horn.

“All that time, while waiting endlessly for help to come I was talking to Zech asking if he was ok but there was no reply. I thought he, like me, was knocked unconscious. (help came 2 hours later). The impact was so great that for the first few days I couldn’t lift up my neck. I dislocated my hip and there was a big gash down the left side of my face.

The Rescue

TS Loh

“Rescue came at 4.30 am. At 3 am they were already at the gate (of the farm) trying to gain access.

“When I first heard the rumbling, I started thinking – this can’t be happening to me. Even before the landslide hit I was asking God: why do you want to treat me like this? What did I do wrong? (All with the thought at the back of my mind that we all could perished in this landslide).

“That time I also thought about my wife and son. What will happened to them, cause they are in the car farther from I?

After the landslide, other campers dug to rescue the teacher and her daughter. On seeing the enormous landslide and the amount of soil around us I resigned myself to the fact that my wife and child were buried underneath it and can only wait for rescuers to come. I only had a clue of their location when I heard the car horn about 20 to 30 minutes later.

“The whole night the feeling of being very helpless, nothing much you can do, just trying to stay calm and alive. Hui Ching, the woman I helped, was begging with us to dig and rescue her niece. We had no tools and the soil was thick and heavy. We couldn’t do much.

“When the bomba finally arrived (at the location), we flashed our lights  to give them our location. The bomba saw one person lying near our campsite and asked us to help bring her out. We tried but we could not as it was steep and the soil was soft. At the same time, I shouted to my wife to press the horn so that that bomba could locate her. Then, I asked the bomba to go to the location of my car following the sound of the horn.

“I remember watching from afar and I could vaguely see the bomba carrying something out but it was not clear. Then, I could see clearer when they took my wife out. The whole night I did not ask the bomba if my son and wife were alive. But my friends helped by shouting to them and asked – ibu and anak ok or not?. Bomba said ok.

“Even when my friends told me the reply from the bomba that they were ok, I knew something was not right because throughout the night I didn’t hear my wife shouting or my son crying. Deep inside I was preparing myself. I could have lost one or both of them.. Yet I couldn’t be sure until I saw them.

“We were brought out by the rescuers after daybreak. We were put near the camp entrance while waiting for the truck to take us to the police station.

“At the roadside, with the rest of the survivors, I saw the KKM people walked past. I asked if they had taken a mother and child to Selayang hospital. They told me they only sent the woman to the hospital but the body of a child was left behind.

“I asked the police for permission to view the body to see if it were my child. When I first uncovered the body, I couldn’t recognise it because the colour of the face had changed. As I slowly looked down, a white shirt I couldn’t tell until I saw his trousers. My worst fear confirmed.

Ei Ein

“When the rescuers pulled me out of the car, I told them to quickly take my son out first. They did. I asked them if he was ok, they told me he was ok. In the ambulance I asked the driver if my son was ok, he said he was. They just said everyone is good, everyone is fine.

“When I arrived at the hospital, after they had attended to my wounds, my friends met me there and they also did not reveal to me, they just said my husband was on the way.

When my husband arrived, the first thing he said to me was “our son had lived a very full life. Very full 7 years.

The empty nest

After his funeral in Petaling Jaya, Zech was taken back to his mother’s hometown in Malacca for burial. This kind of loss is very profound,” Loh said.

“It is a terrible thing to come back to an empty nest. When we hear old people say that they have an empty nest they would still have their children come back to visit them. This one we know he is not. The sense of emptiness. Our lives have revolved so much around him I think we couldn’t really function for the first few months.

“The experience of losing him is very surreal. Even when Loh had broken the news to me I felt that ok maybe I am losing him only for a while and God would resurrect him from the coffin. I was still hoping, during 3 days of the funeral, that he would wake up another day.

”The moment the casket was lowered into the grave, I was overcome by emotions. My husband reminded me that the body would decay but the spirit would live on forever. He sang a ditty that he had invented with Zech as the casket was lowered.

With his arms around me, my husband whispered, how extremely lucky that we have been enabled to “go all out” for our son during his short stay on earth.

“My husband has been a pillar of strength, an adventurous father, a wise spouse who would gently correct me when I err. He knows how to be gentle yet firm, doesn’t lose his cool and he always knows how to have fun.

Pointing to a photo of Loh hugging Zech and whispering into his ear, Ei Ein said Loh always injected fun into routines to encourage their son.

“Here Loh was whispering to him to affirm his love by saying a sentence with a different adjective like I love crazy Zech, …smarty Zech…Ferrari Zech.”

“And sometimes he would tell me if I had forgotten the day earlier so I would need to say it extra time to him,” Loh misses the quiet moments with Zech during bedtime when he used to read to him or just spent time chit chatting in the dark.

“We tried to get him to sleep on his own and he agreed to do so on his birthday on Oct 29. But he would insist that we kept the door open. He did this for a few nights only and after that he wanted us to come into his room to sleep with him.

“At least we got to sleep with him for a few more weeks (before the tragedy).”

 The couple have since returned to the Orang Asli kampung to relive memories of days spent with Zech there and met with the kids he used to play with.

Picking up the pieces

Spread out on the patio of their home are boxes of fragmented pieces of coloured glass. Loh and Ei Ein will salvage the precious time and memories with their son by using the pieces of glass to compose a designed image of Zech for his tomb.