Marianne Merten
`I have no more tears left,” says Keith Mentor, whose three-year-old granddaughter, Chantine Veldsman, was shot in the head at point-blank range last Saturday in Mitchells Plain.
The little girl clung to life at Cape Town’s Red Cross Children’s Hospital for two days. On Monday Chantine was declared brain dead and the life support was switched off.
Says her uncle, Carlo Veldsman (19):”I was standing there when she died. She fought to the last. On Saturday evening we were still talking to her. She moved her eyes. She was still communicating. There were tears in her eyes. I wiped them away.”
Mentor is angry. Chantine was playing outside her home in Buick Street, Beacon Valley, with two friends when a masked gunman shot at a group of men drinking beer. Wheelchair-bound Jerome Petersen died.
The three children tried to hide when the shots rang out. The attacker spotted Chantine, pointed the gun just above her right ear and pulled the trigger. As Chantine collapsed, he calmly walked to a bakkie and climbed in while the driver put the car into gear.
“If I should get hold of him … It’s pathetic, being so cowardly to cover his face. What grown-up in their right mind would do something to a three-year-old?” Mentor asks.
Veldsman was playing soccer on Saturday afternoon. Chantine had begged him to take her along. “She always knew when I was going,” he says. “She used to hide my soccer boots. She would always speak her mind. If you promised her something, she would remind you and even scold you.
“Now she’s not there. That man who shot her, I don’t know. I don’t know if he has a heart, a conscience.”
Veldsman shakes his head and looks at the floor of the little bedroom. Chantine’s mum, Christel Veldsman, and granny Carol are struggling. Says Mentor: “It’s like sitting in a closed box with bombs going off all around. What hurts more is not knowing why. ”
Natasha Reynolds lives at the top of Buick Street. Grim-faced she wonders who will be next, whether it will be her house or her family. “Why must they kill this child? It could have been my child. It could have been your child.”
Christine Hoffman is a close family friend who has been in and out of the Veldsman home for the past few days, answering the telephone, making tea and coffee for visitors. “It’s shocking. I really can’t put it in words. She was just playing in the driveway. I feel so sorry for the family,” says Hoffman.
A few days after the girl’s death, Buick Street residents held a prayer meeting to voice their support for the family. Many are angry and there has been talk of revenge. Carlo Veldsman says his friends wanted to go looking for the killer. “But we are not gangsters. So I talked them out of it.”
Residents have come forward to tell the police what happened despite their fear. A bakkie similar to the one used in the shooting, also without number plates, has been seen in the street.
Chantine Veldsman, Sadicka Hendricks, Christel Abrahams, Sadieka Toffar, Taryn Bush, Wayne Jansen, Raygana Abdurahman and Shameez Samaai – just some of the victims of drive-by shootings, pipe-bombings, gang fights and clashes between gangsters and vigilantes.
Thabit Muller (17) was also shot in the head last weekend while attending a braai on a pavement in Hanover Park.
Teenagers have been killed, often in places where they should feel safe, such as their homes and schools – like David Boyes (16) who wasEgunned down outside the principal’s office at Mitchells Plain Cedar High School.
The parents of Sadicka Hendricks (4) moved after their daughter was gunned down in the driveway of their Surrey Estate home. She was hit by an R-5 bullet while on her way to crche with her father in November.
Days earlier, Christel Abrahams (7) was playing in the yard of a block of flats in Ocean View when a group of men opened fire and she died in the crossfire. Raygana Abdurahman (11) was in a taxi driving between Mitchells Plain and Bokaap with her mother when a bullet killed her in November.
In March, Taryn Bush (4) and her grandmother visited friends in Manenberg. Gangsters opened fire on the flat, killing the toddler. Sadieka Toffar (2) died after a hand grenade was thrown into her home in Surrey Estate almost three years ago.
The Veldsman family is preparing for a funeral. This weekend Chantine will be laid to rest just days before what would have been her fourth birthday.