By Angelique Serrao
A woman in Bryanston, Sandton, was robbed and stabbed – allegedly by the man hired to protect her – and when she ran to her neighbours, they refused to help her.
The 58-year-old woman, who does not want to be identified, lives in a secure complex in Grosvenor Road in Bryanston. The four clusters in her complex are guarded by security guards around the clock.
The woman said she has always been security conscious and recently put security bars and trellis doors on her property.
On Tuesday last week, her husband went on a trip overseas and she came home at 10pm after visiting friends.
“I tried to open the gate with my remote, but it wouldn’t open. I then hooted for the security guard to open. I waited three or four minutes before I saw him peering over the gate before it opened. Already then I had an uneasy feeling, but I ignored it,” the woman said.
She parked her car and when she approached her house, she noticed that the door was open. “I knew then that something was wrong, and I turned around and ran,” she said.
But the intruder, whom she would later identify as the security guard who earlier that day let her out of the complex, knew she was there and he jumped on to her.
“He was on top of me and started stabbing me. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t know then I was being stabbed. I thought he was just hitting me,” she said.
She managed to push the man off her and he ran away. “I started slipping as I ran. When I looked down, I realised it was my own blood,” she said.
The woman had been stabbed twice in the neck – once on the side and once in the back. Her right wrist had been slashed.
She ran to the cluster next door, a B&B, but all the doors were closed and nobody would open when she screamed for help.
“I took my shirt off to try and stop the bleeding in my neck and ran to the next cluster,” she said.
“I knocked on the door and was screaming ‘I’ve been stabbed’. A man looked out of the window upstairs and said he wouldn’t open the door for me. I said ‘Sir, please help me I’m dying. I have children, please help’.”
She said her neighbour said to her: “Stop screaming. Be quiet. Lie on the grass and wait, I’ve called ADT.” Eventually, his wife threw a T-shirt down to her to cover herself.
“They threw a shirt to me as if I was a dog that had been run over,” the woman said. She estimates that she lay there for about 30 minutes.
And it was only after much begging that one of the neighbours called the woman’s son, who arrived and took her to Morningside Medi-Clinic.
She received about 20 stitches and the doctor said she was lucky because the main artery in her neck had been missed by just a millimetre.
She still has her bloodied clothes and she said when she went back to the complex this week, she saw her own blood all over the driveway and on her neighbour’s window.
Her neighbour’s sent her flowers the next day and she said they had been too scared to help her.
“What kind of humanity do we have,” she asked. “They could see me bleeding, and they wouldn’t come and help. I wish people would have the courage to come and help others when they need it.”
Only a laptop had been stolen from her home, but the guard had left his uniform inside and her bags filled with her things had been left by the door. A charge of attempted murder has been opened against the man, but the woman said police have not been able to find him yet.
She believes her attacker had thought she had gone overseas with her husband.
Warrant Officer Moses Maphakela said he could not check on the case because Sandton police station’s computer system was down.
The woman has been receiving trauma counselling.
“This man, someone who was supposed to protect me, tried to murder me. That changes you,” she said. - The Star