”Oh Lord, I’m burning.” These were the last words of 21-year-old Pollsmoor prisoner Marilyn Syfers as flames engulfed her cell on the evening of April 4 this year.
They are recorded in an affidavit from a fellow inmate, which forms part of the documentation of the official inquiry into the incident, a copy of which the South African Press Association obtained this week.
Some details of the tragedy — including the fact that Syfers was chained to the grill of her cell door at the time — have already been made public.
But the affidavits mean that the story of Syfers’s death can for the first time be told in something approximating the words of those involved.
Syfers, from Swellendam, was serving a two-year sentence for theft, housebreaking and contempt of court, and was, because of a bureaucratic mix-up, being held in the juvenile section of the female prison.
According to her cellmate, Zanda van Wyk, Syfers had been very emotional ”because she had no visits and did not get attention from the members”.
The week before the incident, Syfers told Van Wyk she was going to set their common cell alight. ”I said to her if she wants to set the cell alight, I must go out, because I don’t want to die,” Van Wyk said in her affidavit.
Van Wyk would have known just how dangerous this could be: in two separate incidents in Pollsmoor in 2004, six male inmates died after setting mattresses and clothing alight.
‘Necessary force’
Wilhelmiena Abrahams, the staffer in charge of the section or ”unit” in which Syfers was being held, said in her affidavit that after breakfast on the morning of Monday April 3, Syfers refused to enter her cell to be locked up.
After unsuccessfully pleading with Syfers, Abrahams and two other staffers managed to get her into the cell ”using necessary force”. Inside the cell, Syfers opened the tap, broke the cell window and swore hysterically. When two male staff members arrived as reinforcements, she was sitting on top of the steel cupboard in the cell.
Taken in handcuffs to the office of the acting head of the female prison, Kegomoditskie Mpa, she refused to sit down, and the two male staffers ”had to push her to sit down”, Abrahams said. There she continued to behave aggressively, urging the members to take off the handcuffs ”so that she can show us what she will do”.
”Ms Mpa tried to speak to the inmate several times but she did not succeed,” Abrahams said.
Mpa takes up the tale: ”I then give special instructions to Ms Abrahams that the inmate should be footcuffed, then handcuffed and belly chains be put on her. I also gave instructions that she must be chained to the grill whereby she would be unable to break windows or hurt herself. This was a solution to me since we have been doing this on previous occasions.”
A belly chain is a chain around the midriff through which the handcuffs are looped to restrict an inmate’s ability to use his or her hands.
Isolation
Syfers was taken to a single cell in the isolation section, where the staffers chained her to the grill of her cell door. In Abrahams’s words, she was ”belly chained around the grill”, though this appears to have left her enough freedom to lie down, as this was the position her body was found in after the fire.
After the chaining was completed, Abrahams sent a colleague to call a nurse from the female prison’s hospital. She did not say in her affidavit why she did this, but according to the colleague it was to check on the tightness of the chains. Whatever the reason, there was no nurse on duty.
The Correctional Services Act lays down several conditions to the use of mechanical restraints, saying they may be used only for the minimum period necessary, that they may never be ordered as a form of punishment or disciplinary measure, and that restraints other than handcuffs or leg irons ”may only be used on prisoners when outside their cells”.
The Act also says that while a violent prisoner may be subjected to ”segregation” in a single cell, this must be reported at once to the independent inspecting judge, and the prisoner’s health must be assessed at least once a day by a health professional.
”Segregation must be discontinued if the registered nurse, psychologist or medical officer determines that it poses a threat to the health of the prisoners,” the Act says.
No nurse, psychologist or medic visited Syfers, and her case was not reported to the inspecting judge while she was alive.
Rules
Mpa, on her own admission, was ”fully aware” of the rules on both segregation and mechanical restraints.
”I did not ignore this provisions deliberately; my intention was to personally reconcile offender Marilyn Syfers and the unit manager, Ms Abrahams,” she said. ”At that moment it was my view that I was to make a follow-up personally and to make an intervention for help.”
Whatever the ”intervention for help” was that Mpa had intended, it did not come that day, though Mpa said she did issue special instructions to her subordinates to check on Syfers.
Syfers remained in chains — with breaks, on Mpa’s orders, for a bath, exercise and visits to the toilet — for the rest of that day and night. She was still chained to the cell door on the morning of Tuesday April 4.
Two of Mpa’s subordinates said in their affidavits that Mpa told staff at the 7am duty parade that she did not intend to see Syfers that day, but would deal with her only on Wednesday.
Mpa’s affidavit, however, makes no mention of this. On her version, she made a special point of going to see Syfers twice on Tuesday, telling her she was arranging a reconciliation session with Abrahams. Syfers did not respond on either occasion.
Mpa said she also tried to get hold of a social worker or psychologist, ”but to no avail”.
‘Hondjie’
At 6pm Syfers asked Natasha Botha, a sentenced prisoner in the cell next door to hers, for tobacco and a hondjie, a taper of toilet paper that prisoners use to light cigarettes.
”I then threw it in her direction of the cell because all the blank [solid metal] doors were left open,” Botha said in her affidavit.
”From my cell, I could smell the tobacco and after 10 minutes I started to smell smoke. I then saw the smoke going up. Forty-five minutes before asking for tobacco, inmate Marilyn Syfers told us that the ‘boere sien nie vir haar nie [the staff are not paying attention to her]’ and ‘ek gaan myself aan die brand steek [I am going to set myself on fire]’.
”I did not believe what she said because we were all laughing. ‘O Here, ek brand [Oh Lord, I’m burning],’ was her last words and I then realised that the cell was burning,” Botha said.
”I then press the button for the intercom system in the cell to alert and draw the attention of [staff] members. The members did not respond immediately.
”I climb[ed] at the window of the cell and cried for help. The members came late but I am not sure how long did they take before responding. The fire was stopped by the members. That is all I wish to state.”
Fire
There were only three staffers on duty at the female prison that evening, all of them CO3s, the lowest rank in correctional services other than a student correctional officer. At the time, all of them were in another area, processing a group of prisoners back from court.
The CO3 in charge, Lindelwa Ntanjana, was serving food to the group when she heard prisoners screaming, and smelled fire and smoke.
”The area was dark but I could see the sprinkler pipe next to the cells in the passage. I then attempted to open the sprinkler pipe, only to find that it was out of order,” she said. ”The fire was still burning at the time as I rushed back to the arsenal to fetch the fire extinguisher … I took the fire extinguisher and rushed back to the isolation unit. I started blowing the fire with [the] extinguisher.
”The offender was lying down on [her] face. I could not see whether the offender was still alive or not at the time, but she was quiet. The fire extinguisher got finished and we used water buckets to stop the fire.”
Mpa, summoned from her home on the prison grounds, arrived to find Syfers’s charred body, unlocked from the bars by one of her would-be rescuers, but with the cuffs still on her feet and hands.
”It was not a good experience to see a female offender … dying that kind of tragic death,” she said. ”My intention was to get to the root of her problem and to prevent her from injuring herself and those that are around her, including officials.
”This has been the most challenging experience of my career. I deeply regret that this has happened resulting in the [loss] of life for an offender. That is all I wish to declare.”
Recommendations
The inquiry, carried out by four staffers all drawn from the Pollsmoor complex, came up with a host of recommendations, including smoke detectors, sprinklers and a specialised firefighting team.
It also recommended that female offenders who are juveniles — which Syfers was not — should not be subjected to mechanical restraints while in the prison.
As a result of the inquiry, Mpa and Abrahams have been suspended from duty and face disciplinary charges along with two other staffers.
A separate probe has been launched into why no medical staff were available.
The recommendations were approved by acting regional commissioner James Smalberger, who said the area commissioner — the official in charge of the entire Pollsmoor complex — should ”ensure implementation and report monthly on progress unless stated otherwise”.
He also tied up one loose end: Syfers’s family had come down from Swellendam to identify the body, and had said they wanted to bury her at home rather than in Cape Town.
”The application … to transport the body of the late Syfers was handled functionally and finalised on 10 April 2006,” he said. — Sapa