By the time Aiia Maasarwe’s father arrived at the silent vigil planned in his daughter’s honour on Friday night, the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne were full.
Attendees sat in neat rows marching up the grand stone staircase looking down Bourke Street to the tram stop where Maasarwe, a 21-year-old Palestinian student, boarded the No.86 tram on Tuesday night and never made it home.
No one spoke until Saeed Maasarwe, who arrived in Australia 36 hours earlier to identify his daughter’s body, asked to address the crowd. Through a family friend, he said that seeing the number of people – more than a thousand – who had gathered to keep vigil had eased some of his pain.
Earlier, he told reporters that losing Aiia was his “worst dream”.
“She was very happy here, she liked everything here in Australia,” he said. “The five months she was here, she has enjoyed, she has had a good time here. And then this has come: The very worst. The most worst it can be.”
Aiia, an Israeli national from the predominantly Arab city of Baqa al-Gharbiyye, was in Melbourne on a student exchange program with Latrobe College, part of Latrobe University.
She was killed between midnight and 1am on Wednesday morning on the 1km walk between the tram stop on Plenty Road at the Polaris Shopping Centre in Bundoora and her off-campus apartment on Main Drive.
She had spent the afternoon with a meetup group of international students seeking to practise their English and then went to the Comics Lounge in North Melbourne with friends. Some of them gave her a lift into Bourke Street, where she jumped on the No.86 tram home and made the 50-minute journey to stop 61, Bundoora Park.
She was walking home from the tram stop and talking on Facetime to her younger sister when the phone suddenly fell to the ground. Her body was found by tradesmen at 7am, barely hidden behind bushes on the grassy slope between the footpath and the shopping centre’s double-storey car park.
Police arrested a 20-year-old man on Friday and detained him for questioning about her death, but no charges have been announced.
At the vigil at Parliament House, there was a feeling of deja vu. Many of those who attended had also been present at the vigil in Princes Park in Carlton North last year for murdered comedian Eurydice Dixon. Some had also attended the marches for Jill Meagher, who was murdered in 2012.
All three women died while walking home after a night out.
“Every woman should be allowed to travel home and not feel in threat of her life,” one attendee, Di Phillips, told Guardian Australia. “I have got daughters myself — mine are a bit older, 30 and 31, but I still fear for them.
“I travel by myself a lot, coming home late, but I have convinced myself I am old and invisible, no one will take any notice of me. But it still makes me stop and think: maybe I’m not so invisible.
“If we don’t do things like [the vigil], the general male population won’t realise that it’s not OK.”
In the crowd, women like Phillips acted as guardians for their younger counterparts. A woman in her early 20s arrived alone and began weeping; the older woman next to her reached out and held her hand.
Acquaintanceships forged on the steps became small groups, which splintered as the crowd began to leave. Three young women, who had just met, doled out concerns and reassurances. How are you getting home? Are you sure you’re alright? It’s not far. I’ll be fine. Text me when you get there.
Earlier on Friday, the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, offered his condolences to Aiia’s family and friends.
“She should have been safe here,” he tweeted. “And I am heartbroken she wasn’t.”
He added: “Nothing will change until we change, too. Until we stop blaming ‘bad men’ – while ignoring the sexist attitudes in our society that created them.”
At 8.01pm, a special service of the No.86 tram left the Bourke Street stop carrying flowers brought by mourners to the vigil and accompanied by several dozen people. The flowers were bound for the site where Aiia’s body was found, adding to a pile already left by locals and university students.
Among those on the tram was 19-year-old Camille Muskens.
“I live on the 86,” she said. “It could have been me.”
Like the other women who spoke to Guardian Australia, Muskens often travels home alone on public transport late at night, and, like the rest, she takes a series of steps.
“I am constantly walking home with keys in my hands,” she said. “There’s always one of my oldest friends who says: OK, text me when you’re home safe. I can’t imagine what [Aiia’s] friends must have felt when she didn’t text them … it’s just horrific, I can’t even put it into words.”
At every stop along the route, a handful of people, some clutching bouquets, some with single stems plucked from their own gardens, handed flowers in.
“I always felt really safe in Melbourne until the last couple of years,” said Holly Carscallen, 27, who waited at the Westgarth Street tram stop in Northcote with her flatmates to hand in their flowers. “It’s just a hard thing to have to swallow when we live in such a progressive time.”
