All it took was one minute 56 seconds. The white 3 Series BMW, with a sunroof, follows the white Toyota Fortuner into the gate of the old-age home.
Pulling up close behind the 4x4, three men get out of the luxury car.
The first – a tall bulky man wearing a white shirt – takes a 9mm gun from the back of his belt.
He walks towards the driver of the Fortuner.
A second man adjusts his balaclava, AK-47 in his left hand. He approaches the 4x4.
Opening the passenger door of the Fortuner, the balaclava man points the automatic rifle at the woman. He takes her handbag, rings and cellphone. Then he calmly returns to the BMW.
There he hands the handbag to a short, stout man watching over the security guards, one of whom he has forced to crawl back to the guard house.
A woman and a girl get out of the Fortuner and sit on the grass while the driver of the BMW reverses out of the gate and prepares to flee.
One by one the 9mm man, the balaclava man and the short man go back to the 4x4.
Then the 9mm man goes to the woman and her daughter sitting on the grass to check that they’ve got everything from them before walking to the gate of the old-age home.
Short man gets into the Fortuner, turns it around and picks up 9mm man. The two drive away.
Two minutes, and it’s all over.
This is the footage obtained by The Star of a Rolex gang stealing the Rolex and personal belongings of Benoni residents.
What the camera does not show is how 9mm man approached the driver, who would be revealed only as Brian, and told him: “Please hand me your Rolex.”
In an interview with The Star later, Brian described the men as “good bad guys”.
“He even said to me, ‘please don’t look at me. I don’t want to shoot you. Please don’t look at me’. They were very courteous,” said Brian.
The men had followed Brian and his family from Eastgate mall, where they had spent about three hours, to the old-age home in Jet Park.
Police sources say this is the fourth reported Rolex-related robbery in the area since December.
Three of the four crimes took place between April and this month.
And the 2010 model BMW with a sunroof has been identified as the car linked to all the incidents in that area.
In the first, in December, a Boksburg resident was followed from Elridge mall to her home on a Sunday afternoon.
Two armed men attacked her in her driveway and stole her watch while her husband and children were in the back garden.
The robbers did not take her car – a Hyundai Tucson – but took the keys and locked the car.
“By the time the woman could scream for her husband and son to come forward, the group were gone,” said a police source.
In the second incident, on April 24, the robbers robbed a father and son of their rolexes after the pair had gone to the Elridge shopping centre to buy icecream.
“The father had seen the white BMW following him but initially thought it was a friend of his,” the police officer said.
The BMW driver then turned into a driveway, three houses away from the father’s house, but as he pulled into his driveway, the robbers hit and took their Rolexes.
In the third incident, at a residential complex, the robbers didn’t get any jewellery as the victim managed to slip inside before the men got to the car window.