Johannesburg -
The tiny pink dress hangs clean and ready on the washing line, but Olivia Said will never wear it again.
On Tuesday, two-year-old Olivia died when she fell from the third floor of a block of flats in the Joburg inner city and a man was injured when he also fell, apparently in a desperate attempt to catch her.
Olivia died on the Jeppe Street pavement, and the man hit a parked car. He survived and was taken to hospital.
On Tuesday afternoon, Olivia’s shattered parents were trying to understand what had happened.
Olivia and her mother, Miriam George, had arrived from their home in Malawi late on Monday night for a brief visit to Joburg, and were staying in the flat on the corner of Von Brandis and Jeppe streets.
The child's father, Jesus Said, works in Joburg and lives elsewhere, but rushed to the flat when the police called him.
George had been out of the flat, washing clothes in the nearby washroom.
Olivia was in the flat with the man, a relative, who was apparently making tea on the wide window sill.
The window is about 90cm from the floor, so the family was trying to figure out how Olivia could have climbed up there herself. The relative was unable to talk to them after his fall.
There is a narrow balcony a floor below, but both Olivia and the man apparently missed it and fell the full three floors down.
A container of salt, apparently knocked from the window, lay on the balcony.
People spoke of the child falling first, followed by the man.
In the street, passers-by heard shrieks and saw first the child, then the man falling.
“I just saw her falling,” said Meli Moyo, a hairdresser who was working on a customer's dreadlocks at the time.
“Her uncle fell on top of the car. He was trying to help.”
He said the child died and the man appeared to have broken his legs and sustained head injuries. He said police arrived within minutes.
“It was terrible, it’s not just a small thing,” said Moyo.
Upstairs in the flat, Olivia’s mother wept.
Olivia’s tiny clothes – almost all of them pink – fluttered in the breeze on a washing line strung along the passage.
The little girl would have turned three next month.
Her mother whispered about how she would take shoes and, pretending they were cars, “drive” them around the floor.
“She liked to sing,” said George, describing how she was teaching her daughter to pray and how much Olivia had enjoyed that.
Her older daughter is at home in Malawi.
An official at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital confirmed that the man had been taken there and was being assessed for possible internal and head injuries.
The SAPS confirmed that a child had fallen from a building.
The Star