Cape Town - An Elsies River woman says she is lucky to be alive after a night of horror on the notorious R300 highway in which her boyfriend was killed by heartless robbers.
A devastated Joylene Gordon, 34, says Ernest Abrahams, 40, a father of two, died while begging for her life.
She says they were coming from Mitchells Plain, where Ernest lived, and were driving along the R300 near the Stellenbosch Arterial in the early hours of Tuesday morning when their beige Mazda bakkie got stuck without petrol.
She says it was about 1 am and the road was very quiet.
She says two armed men and a woman “came out of nowhere” and asked them what was wrong.
“We told them, but said that we had called for help,” the heartbroken woman says.
“They asked what we had on us. Ernest gave his money; I gave my phone. They took his shoes and the woman took mine, leaving her slippers on the side of the road,” she says with tears rolling down her face.
Ernest Abrahams, 40, was shot and killed
The couple was then told to get out and help push the bakkie off the road.
She says they were made to follow a footpath and at one point they told Ernest to get into a hole.
Joylene says: “They tried to bite the ring off my finger but I told them I could remove it. I started panicking and Ernest got out of the hole, trying to plead with them, and a shot went off. I screamed and started to run towards a house on the corner.”
“As I was banging and shouting for the people to open, I heard another two shots go off. These people (suspects) then ran past me.”
She says no one opened the door and she ran back to the road to find help, and a truck and a car passed her.
She says when the third vehicle came by, she was on her knees begging for help.
“The driver reversed. The driver told me to get in and he’d take me to the police station.
“I asked him to stop close to a friend’s house and he dropped me on a corner and I ran to my friend.
“I called my family. When we got to the scene, police were already there.”
Police spokesperson, Lieutenant-Colonel André Traut, confirmed the incident.
“The murder of a 40-year-old male is under investigation after he was shot and killed by two males and one female after his vehicle ran out of fuel on the R300 in Delft around 1.20am on Tuesday,” he said.
“His female partner fled the scene unharmed. The circumstances are under investigation and no one has been arrested as yet.”