Johannesburg - She was snatched from her mother’s womb and left for dead on the cold floor.
As her mother - Valencia Behrens - lay on the ground, abdomen gaping open and bleeding to death, Hope - who was lying in a pool of blood, the umbilical cord still attached to the uterus - clung to life.
The person who had cut open her mother’s abdomen had cut the little girl on the side of her tiny head on that January 6, 2012 afternoon.
Her family gave the miracle baby two names - Hope and Mercy.
Mercy because the family believed God had spared her life and Hope because, although Behrens was brutally taken from them, God had given them Hope.
Today, Hope is 2 years old.
She and her four siblings are being raised by her father, Joseph Pieterse, and his mother Sinah in Toekomsrus, Randfontein.
On Wednesday, the family spoke of how Behrens’s brutal end had left them with wounds they didn’t think would ever heal.
On January 6, Pieterse was told to rush to Loretta Cook’s house. He found the mother of his children lying on the ground, dead.
Pieterse thought the mother and child were dead, but learnt later that the baby had been rushed to the clinic.
Pieterse said he was a wreck afterwards. For the first few days after the incident, he could not look at his children or play with them as they were a painful reminder that Behrens was gone forever.
As he planned Behrens’s funeral and spent each day trying to make sense of what had happened, Hope spent the two weeks in hospital fighting for her life, which meant he was unable to bond with her.
When she was discharged from hospital, he found the excitement of having an additional family member that he had felt before Behrens’s killing was no longer there.
“I was just numb,” Pieterse said. “I would look into her eyes, searching for answers, asking myself why anyone would hurt her and her mother.”
With Behrens gone, it was Pieterse’s then-78-year-old mother who had to raise the little girl.
The old woman uses a crutch, meaning that she has only one free hand.
“I would carry her with one arm… As I carried her, I would hope that she does not fall.
“She was raised by only one arm. God is a good God,” Sinah, now 80, said.
The little girl now calls her “mom”.
Before the incident, Pieterse’s other children and their cousins used to go and play with friends at their homes or in the street. Today, however, paranoia has set in.
“They are not allowed to anymore. We used to think we are a community. We have now made them prisoners in their own home to protect them from others,” Pieterse said.
The grieving man has since bonded with Hope, but says he dreads the day he will have to tell her the circumstances under which she was born.
Cook has been charged with murder and Hope’s attempted murder. She has pleaded not guilty. Judgment in the case was expected on Thursday.
The Star