Within hours of TJ dying in Sydney Children's Hospital at 1am on Sunday, the news began to spread through Sydney's urban indigenous heartland like wildfire; the cops had chased an Aboriginal kid to his death.

Shane Phillips, of the Tribal Warrior Association, said he knew of two witnesses who were prepared to testify to a coronial inquiry that police were chasing TJ in the minutes before his death.

It is testimony that will be hotly contested.

One eyewitness came forward yesterday to say the suspicion that police had chased TJ to his death was based more on rumour than reason.

The man, an immigrant local who would not give his name, told The Australian he had not seen TJ riding his red pushbike ahead of police when they came hurtling eastward up Phillip Street before eventually finding their way to the crash site.

He saw two officers run towards the impaled boy and lift him from the fence before placing him on the laneway and attempting to resuscitate him.

It is understood a passerby who phoned the ambulance and flagged down police after finding TJ on the fence post holds the key to how police came to find him and why they were travelling so fast.

NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney, Area Commander Bob Waites and the two officers who arrived on the scene insist they had not been chasing TJ before he died.

Instead, they say they were cruising nearby streets looking for a bag snatcher who did not fit the dead youth's description, and were flagged down by a passerby and told of the dying youth's plight.

But by late on Sunday afternoon, fuelled by the rumour mill around Redfern, the plans for retribution had taken shape after a day of soaring temperatures and high humidity -- and alcohol.

About 5.30pm a group of about 30 Aboriginal youths began to taunt the police contingent, which had swelled throughout the day.

But the barbs soon became bricks and bottles. For the next nine hours, Sydney streets resembled a war zone, with police in riot gear struggling to control a crowd that had grown to more than 200.

Fuelled by alcohol, incensed by their treatment by police, pushing wheelie bins loaded with ammunition, they proved an overwhelming force.

Molotov cocktails and firecrackers rained down on police, 40 of whom were injured, several with concussion and broken bones. Redfern train station was set alight and cars burned. Parents looked on, unable -- and often unwilling - to bring calm. By the time peace had been restored - about 2am yesterday - only five arrests had been made.

By yesterday morning, broken glass and paving stones were being swept away by Community Development Project workers. But they could do nothing to ease the pain of a community that, despite the work to repair relations with police, remains impoverished, embittered and now in mourning for a 17-year-old boy.

"I feel very upset about what the police done to my son," TJ's mother Gail Hickey said. "I'm trying to protect my son from coppers."

TJ's crash site is in the shadows of the two public housing towers that have come to symbolise the impoverished inner south and the litany of racial tensions, violence, crime and drug use that have come to be associated with them. TJ had a first instance warrant for assault outstanding on him - ample reason to be spooked by a cruising police van, clearly looking for someone.

But with TJ dead, and the mood on the streets of Redfern remaining tense, the only common ground between police and locals is that officers were somewhere in the vicinity when he crashed on the way to visit his girlfriend, and that a young life had been needlessly extinguished.