Muzi pleaded. He pleaded with his mother to quickly call the police for he and his sister were about to die at the hands of man who had claimed he loved them.
Then the phone went dead and Andiswa Mdibi never heard her 8-year-son’s voice again.
A month after that call, Andiswa identified Muzi and his sister Elam, 9, at the Diepkloof mortuary in Soweto.
Their bodies were so decomposed that she was taken into a room and shown pictures on a computer screen.
She knew it was them from the soiled clothes they were wearing on the day they were abducted.
The two had been found in a pit last Monday behind Slovoville cemetery in Soweto, their hands tied behind their backs. They had been blindfolded.
The unlikely man who allegedly abducted the two had disappeared.
It is so out of character for this man, that if he was the killer, both Andiswa and the residents of Tshepisong Phase7 say they are at a loss as to why he would have done it.
“He loved those children, even though they were not his. He was not a bad person,” says Andiswa, of her former boyfriend.
The man can’t be named as he has not been arrested, but is well known in Tshepisong, on the edge of the West Rand.
Residents who know him say he was “painfully passive”, preferring non- aggression even he had a right to be angry.
Once, they said, he found an ex-girlfriend in bed with another man. He did nothing to the ex-girlfriend or her lover.
On another occasion, the same ex-girlfriend is said to have set his shack alight in a fit of rage. He left her alone.
But it appears that man had a burning rage the day he allegedly abducted Muzi and Elam. Andiswa had broken up with him; he had accused her of an affair.
He had taken it badly and there was talk in the township that “he would show her”.
Then on September 7, Andiswa heard that her ex had come to the house and taken the children. He claimed he was going to buy them ice cream.
Andiswa phoned her ex and he admitted he had the children.
“He told me he would swop them for me - instead of killing them, he would kill me,” says Andiswa. “He told me to arrange my coffin.”
He then allowed the children to speak into the phone.
“They said they were in the veld, and they didn’t know where they were. Muzi told me to call the police.”
Andiswa said she went to a police station and opened a case.
“I asked the police to close the border posts because he would try to take my children home with him to Mozambique.”
As she feared for her life, Andiswe left her home and went into hiding. Her neighbours would later tell her that on two occasions men came looking for her.
One of the men carried a gun.
Andiswe only returned home when she heard of the discovery of the two bodies. She is sure they are her children; she doesn’t hold any hope that DNA might prove her wrong.
undefinedVideo by Rabbie Serumula
Her children have yet to be buried.
Police say they have a known suspect in the case and have asked that he hand himself over.
There is more talk in the township.
The ex-boyfriend has been seen in Mozambique; he passed through his village, they say, heading to a place where he will not be recognised.
He made it to Mozambique even though Andiswe still had his passport.
This will make it more difficult for the police to catch him, she has been told.
But if they do eventually catch him, then she and the people of Tshepisong may learn what finally turned a gentle man into a suspected child killer.