The Provincial transport department and traffic authorities are calling for witnesses to a horror crash on the N2 last month to come forward.
The collision left two women dead. Estelle Brigando, 50, and 18-year-old Courtney Moore died after the crash, which happened at about 1.30am on June 16.
The accident happened just past the airport near the R300 turn-off, when a Mercedes-Benz C-Class Kompressor reportedly smashed into the back of a Toyota Yaris travelling in the direction of Somerset West.
Brigando had taken her elder daughter and Moore to participate in a modern dancing show in Claremont. They were accompanied by her younger daughter, a pupil at Rhenish Girls’ High in Stellenbosch.
According to a source who spoke to the Cape Argus just days after the crash, the Mercedes, travelling at high speed, allegedly hit the Toyota from behind and “smashed it off the road”.
The Toyota had been travelling in the “slow lane” – the left-hand lane – when it was hit.
Brigando’s elder daughter said their car had spun, then rolled before landing on its wheels. Brigando died at the scene and Moore died a few hours later in hospital.
Now Transport and Public Works MEC Robin Carlisle is appealing to anyone who saw the collision or stopped at the scene to come forward and talk to the police or his department.
Hector Elliott, the head of department at the Western Cape department of transport and public works, said it had emerged that no record of witnesses was kept by police at the crash scene.
“Two young girls in the vehicle miraculously survived the crash and although the driver of the Mercedes Benz fled the scene, allegedly to seek medical attention, many more people stopped to render assistance,” said Elliott.
He said the survivors’ recollections, along with CCTV footage captured at the crash site, had shown that people had stopped to help.
One of these people is believed to be a young coloured man who was driving a light- coloured bakkie. He had stopped within a minute of the crash and allowed one of the survivors to use his cellphone, Elliott said.
The same man had also called emergency services.
Another coloured man, in his late thirties or early forties, had told the two crash survivors that he had seen the driver flee, Elliott said.
He said Carlisle was calling urgently for these two men and anyone else who may have been a witness to make contact.
Ross Bartley Sergeant, 33, of Joburg, appeared in the Philippi Magistrate’s Court late last month after handing himself over to police more than a week after the crash.
He is the man alleged to have been behind the wheel of the Mercedes.
He was released on R5 000 bail and the case postponed to October 28 for further investigation.
Before Sergeant’s court appearance, both Carlisle and Community Safety MEC Dan Plato demanded answers from Western Cape police commissioner Arno Lamoer about alleged irregularities in the police’s investigation into the crash.
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