Johannesburg - Two Westdene women fought back against their violent attackers during a home robbery and even tried to stab the criminals with a kitchen knife.
Last Monday night, Elize Stephens was alarmed when her Rhodesian ridgeback started barking inside her home in Westdene, Joburg.
“He went crazy, he never barks,” she said as she recounted her ordeal yesterday.
She alerted her security company, ADT, to the threat and they discovered there were signs of entry over the electric fence, but the men were nowhere to be seen.
On Tuesday, her friend Andrea Daniels came to stay to keep her company as she was nervous.
“The next minute they were standing there with guns,” Stephens said.
The two masked robbers told Stephens to raise her arms, which she did, while Daniels ran to the kitchen to grab a kitchen knife that she tried to use to stab one of the men who chased her, but she was unsuccessful.
They said the men, one armed with a pistol and the other with a spanner, were very aggressive and kept grabbing at their arms as they wrestled with them.
“They pistol-whipped me a few times,” Daniels said.
She said she refused to take the robbery lying down and something inside her told her to fight back.
“I was prepared to be shot, I was prepared to die.”
And she was very nearly killed as, during their scuffle, the man shot at her but luckily missed. The bullet hit a fountain in Stephens’s garden, she said.
Daniels eventually fled and sliced her arm open on a palisade fence, a wound that needed four stitches, as she leapt over Stephens’s exterior fence with the knife still in her hand.
Both women have large, dark bruises on their arms from the men grabbing them, and Stephens said she still struggled to breathe because her attacker kneed her in the ribs.
“I just want to say thank you to ADT and the Westdene police, who were absolutely fantastic,” said Stephens.
Both said they were receiving trauma counselling, and Stephens said she needed tranquillisers to help her to sleep.
“For the first time in my life I’m scared in my own house,” Stephens said.
Daniels said they had decided to talk about their experience to canvass opinion about what the best response was to violent crime.
“It’s a debate: Does one fight back or not?” she asked.
The robbers made off with a laptop, a cellphone, handbags and Stephens’s ID book and bank cards.
The Star