Cape Town - The father of Zephany Nurse has told the Western Cape High Court how he started his own investigation into the kidnapping of his daughter almost nineteen years ago.
Zephany Nurse was snatched from the cot at her mother’s bedside at Groote Schuur hospital when she was just three days old on April 30, 1997.
Born by caesarean section to Morne and Celeste Nurse on April 28, 1997, she was their first child.
Read: #ZephanyNurse case: mom breaks down
A woman, who cannot be identified by order of the court to protect Zephany Nurse’s new identity, has been charged with kidnapping, fraud and contravening the Children’s Act.
Earlier on Tuesday, the 50-year-old Lavender Hill woman pleaded not guilty to all three counts against her.
Morne Nurse told the court that his daughter started grade 8 at the same school as Zephany in 2015.
Zephany Nurse, using another name, was in matric.
Also read: #ZephanyNurse accused pleads not guilty
The younger sibling, according to Nurse’s testimony, told her father that a girl at the school looked just like her.
He arranged to meet Zephany, who was 17 years old at the time, and took her and his other daughter to McDonalds where he questioned her about her life.
“She told me she was born on April 30, 1997, the day my daughter was abducted was her birthdate,” he told the court.
Nurse said the teenager told him she had often questioned why she looked nothing like her parents.
After their meeting, Nurse said he scrutinised her facebook account and gathered information over the course of a month.
He then took that information to Hawks Superintendent Mike Barkhuizen, supplying him with photographs taken off Facebook.
Nurse told the court that he also contacted a woman called Shireen Piet who had been another mother in the communal ward at he time of Zephany’s abduction.
He said he whatsapped the image of the teenager’s mother to Piet who had helped construct an identikit of her at the time, and he then called her ten minutes later.
“She said that face I will never forget and I then phoned Barkhuizen and told him everything,” Nurse told the court.
Nurse testified that he told his daughter, who had initially suspected that Zephany could be her sister, that she should not tell anyone, including her mother Celeste.
Earlier, he told the court that he was called at work at about 4:15pm on April 30, 1997, and told his daughter was missing.
He said when he arrived at the hospital at about 5pm, his wife was being interrogated by police and he asked them to look for his daughter “and that was when the manhunt started”.
The clearly shaken father said: “I was crying my heart out in the foetal position”.
“It was mindblowing, I just couldn’t believe what was happening”.
Morne Nurse was the second state witness to take the stand after an emotional morning of testimony from Celeste Nurse.
The petite and well dressed Celeste broke down on the stand as she recounted the horror of realising her child was missing almost nineteen years ago.
She told the court that she was sedated with a morphine injection and had been in considerable pain following the emergency operation.
Celeste Nurse said she saw a woman, dressed in an oatmeal coloured top and maroon pants, sitting at the door of her communal ward.
She thought the woman was a nurse, and so when her baby started crying and the woman asked her if she could pick up the infant, she said yes.
But at about 4pm that afternoon, a nurse woke her and asked her where her baby was.
“I said: ‘What do you mean where is the baby?'“
Nurse then proceeded to describe how they searched every floor of the hospital to no avail.
She said the police were called and started questioning her.
When state prosecutor Evadne Kortje asked her the name of her child, she said: “Zephany Joy Nurse” and broke down in tears.
African News Agency
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