Jolande Oosterbaan’s fearful suspicion has come true. The Public Prosecution Service announced on Thursday afternoon that an officer in Waalwijk had recently wrongfully shot at her son, Tim van der Boor. Oosterbaan had already predicted this outcome. 27-year-old Tim did not survive the bullet in his neck. “It’s good to admit that a mistake was made, but I’m not going to get it back.”
Together with her daughter, Jolande Oosterbaan from Dordrecht was invited to the office of the Public Prosecution Service (OM) in Breda. “I took some fairytale into account, but it turned into a very open conversation with the Public Prosecution Service, the National Criminal Investigation Department and Victim Support. They were told not to shoot. But it was only satisfying when Tim would have returned with it,” she says.
On the evening of Thursday 17 March, Tim was in a car with his girlfriend, which was parked on Larixplein in Waalwijk. According to his mother, they were ‘smoking a blowout’. Police identified Tim as a suspect in a drug trafficking investigation.
“But in the car were only three bags of coke that belonged to his girlfriend and he himself had no drugs with him. Not even a weapon. That might have been another reason to surround the car they were in with four police cars. One of the 16 men in those cars shot at Tim,” his mother said.
She still doesn’t know why. “Was his weapon broken, was there something wrong with that officer? That all still has to be investigated, but the fact is that the shot was wrong and that should not have happened. It was also a traumatic experience for his girlfriend.”
Jolanda wonders how the officer who fired the fatal shot could have made such a mistake. “He was part of an arrest team, you can expect that the members are well trained. How could it be that my son was shot in the neck? He just bled to death! Before he could even raise his hands, he was already under fire. My ex-husband, Tim’s father, thinks otherwise: the gun may have gone off by accident.”
Whether she is ‘happy’ that the Public Prosecution Service has come out so quickly with the results of the investigation into the use of weapons? “Well, we asked for that ourselves. Because of all kinds of Indian stories circulating about my son. He was portrayed as a drug dealer, as a criminal. He was not,” explains Jolande Oosterbaan, for whom the mourning period is far from over. “I should also add that the police have offered to help pay for a tombstone.”
The National Criminal Investigation Department will continue with its investigation and eventually, normally, it will also lead to a lawsuit against the agent. It will take ‘a good deal of time’ before that, the Public Prosecution Service said. Pending this, the judiciary has said nothing more about this case.
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