Johannesburg - Chantel Morris stands in her kitchen. She and herdaughter, Erin, are diligently making tea and coffee.
A year ago the mood was sombre, the house filled with pain and tears after the death of Chantel and Elwin Morris’s other child, four-year-old son Taegrin.
His death shook not only their Reiger Park, East Rand, community and South Africa, but the world.
“I can only thank God that He has carried us this far. If it weren’t for Him I don’t think I would be standing here today. Since that night, He has carried me through the worst of days,” Morris says as she recalls the night on July 19 that robbers accosted her outside her mother’s home and demanded her car.
Erin was in the back seat and Morris was securing Taegrin’s seat belt.
“It all happened so fast,” Morris says. “At first I thought it was my brother playing a joke on me as he often did, but there (the hijacker) was, with a gun in my face.”
Morris doesn’t know how the other robber made his way to the front passenger seat, but recalls saying: “Okay, please let me take my son.”
But the robbers didn’t wait.
As Taegrin tightened his grip around his mother’s waist, the robbers drove off, ripping her son from her clasp.
“Mama, please help me!” Morris vividly remembers hearing Taegrin cry and his screams fading into the dark as she ran behind the car as fast as she could.
She fell, got up and continued running.
But the car disappeared.
“I don’t hate (the robbers). I just hate the way my son died. He didn’t deserve to die that way.”
The spark in the family’s home was snuffed out that day.
Outside Morris’s home and next door, young boys play with reckless abandon.
“It hurts. I think of how (Taegrin) would have been here, jumping over the walls. I think about his teens, but I find joy in that God lent me a son for four years.”
Morris says that on the night he died, Taegrin went to hug everyone in the family – instead of his pattern of running to her mother’s car and asking everyone to kiss and hug him there.
She recalls that on their last vacation with Taegrin, the family stopped at a store at Hartbeespoort Dam and found the meaning of her son’s name – spiritual gift and hero – in a pamphlet, after looking for it for months.
Morris says her son was certainly a gift.
On Saturday the family and the community will walk along the route the robbers drove with the car, to the place where Taegrin was found dead.
Morris says the family have kept the car in which her son died. She pauses for a moment to consider that her son could well have died for no reason.
Her handbag and her husband’s wallet were found intact in the car when it was recovered later that evening.
“My husband wanted to sell the car. But we sat down and had a discussion. The thing is that it had memories. It had Taegrin’s laughter. How could we erase that? Why would we let them (hijackers) win?”
Morris says men often stop her in the road and give her a hug. Some of them weep. She attributes her strength to the support from family and from the community.
For Erin, who is in Grade 3, a colourful therapy book has become a coping mechanism that contains paintings of every event that has transpired in her life, including her “boetie’s” funeral.
But the family don’t shy away from communicating. Morris says: “We have days in which we sit down and talk about how we miss (Taegrin). We have become stronger,” Morris says.
“I also thank God for the man I have. It’s been hard for him, but he has held it together for us.”
The family’s new shisanyama and car wash business brings some solace.
They are waiting for the day those responsible for their son’s death are arrested and justice is served.
*A memorial walk will take place on Sunday from Taegrin gran’s home on Daisy road and end at the spot where his body was found. The walk begins at 10am.
Saturday Star