Pretoria - All Taegrin Morris was looking forward to on Saturday evening was a meal at McDonald’s. Now the 4-year-old boy’s badly mutilated body is lying in a mortuary after a hijacking in which he was dragged, dangling from his mother’s car.
His head and body possibly hit the road surface as the car was speeding away. The car was found abandoned 4km from the site of the hijacking.
“Mommy, help me,” were the last words Chantel Morris heard her son scream. She watched him hanging helplessly out of the door of her speeding car, hijacked outside her grandmother’s home in Reiger Park, Ekurhuleni.
Little Taegrin was so excited moments before the hijacking when his mother promised to take him to McDonald’s.
He had rushed into the car – a white VW Golf 6 – and waited for his mother to help him strap on his seat belt. His sister Erin, 8, was also in the car.
Morris had been the last to leave the house after her husband Elwin and her sister had left just before her. She had started the car and turned around to strap in her son. As she turned back to the steering wheel, a gun was pressed against her face.
“Voetsek! Voetsek! Gaan julle uit die kar uit (Get lost! Get out of the car),” the hijackers demanded.
A frightened Morris frantically tried to get her children out safely. “I thought it was a joke at first but reality kicked in and I screamed for Erin to jump out of the car. I asked them to let me get my children out, they could take whatever they wanted but please let me have my children. I went to the back to pull out Taégrin.”
As she held her son in her arms trying to loosen him from the safety belt, she felt the car start to move. “I asked them to let me pull my child out because his foot was stuck, but they just sped off and ripped him out of my hands,” she said.
Morris ran after the car, screaming and pleading for her child to be freed.
“The child, the child!” people were heard screaming as they ran behind the car trying to get it to stop.
A manhunt began as soon as a distraught Morris informed her husband of the incident.
He immediately alerted everyone he could and was soon bombarded with calls about people spotting the car.
It took about an-hour-and-a-half until the car was found parked next to an abandoned building in Market Street in Boksburg – about 4km away.
“By the time we got there, the body was dislocated,” said Elwin Morris.
Through her tears, Morris said the hardest part for her was that she could not save her child. Their lives have been put on hold until justice is done.
“I have made peace with him being gone. What makes me angry is that I don’t know how my son died, I don’t know how long he was dragged for, how many times he was run over, the pain he suffered,” said Morris.
She described Taegrin as a “loving, beautiful child” who crept into everyone’s hearts.
“Whatever they (hijackers) tried to do was fruitless. I don’t have a child and I can’t hate them because I don’t know them.”
Morris asked that the men hand themselves over. “My child, I’m never getting him back.”
Debra Boards, whose daughter Lyrique was standing at the gate of their house when the hijackers struck, said the family had reason to believe the hijackers knew them. “How did they know my daughter was deaf? They pointed the gun at her and said she wouldn’t do anything because they knew she was deaf,” she said.
Police said no arrests had been made yet.
“The suspects are still on the run. We’re still searching for them. We’ve opened a murder and hijacking case.”
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Rewards for info on hijackings
Gauteng police on Sunday offered a reward of R50 000 for information about a hijacking that led to the death of Taegrin Morris.
Another R50 000 reward was also offered for information on hijackers who abducted a 6-year-old boy after he and his father were hijacked in Bronkhorstspruit, east of Pretoria, on Tuesday night.
Mongezi Phike was found unharmed in Johannesburg on Sunday.
Gauteng provincial commissioner, Lieutenant-General Lesetja Mothiba, said a task team consisting of members from the provincial office and the station under the leadership of Major-General Tebello Mosikili had been established to investigate both incidents.
Sapa