Hazel Jacobus says she’s been contacted twice by Rashied Staggie regarding the gang-rape of her daughter.
|||Cape Town - The mother of a Manenberg woman raped on gang leader Rashied Staggie’s instruction more than a decade ago and fatally shot recently, says he has twice reached out to her - once in a phone conversation to apologise.
“This man who lives in the avenue (nearby) dialled a cellphone and gave it to me. He said ‘just listen’. I put my ear to the phone. A voice said: ‘Hello Mums. It’s Staggie’. He said he’s sorry for (the rape). But it wasn’t him,” Hazel Jacobus, 55, told the Cape Times on Tuesday in her Manenberg home.
“He said his wife had a stroke, he just wants to be a free man, that maybe we can sense the Lord together. I said maybe. I told him he can kill me. He can do anything. But the only person that can take my life is the Lord.”
She spoke about the March conversation next to a bullet hole in a window - about three weeks ago someone had shot repeatedly into her house. Now she is afraid to leave her home.
In 2003, Hard Livings gangster Staggie was convicted of kidnapping and raping Jacobus’s daughter Chantelle Knight, 30. The incident still haunts the family.
On July 30 this year Knight was shot a number of times and her boyfriend Romano Oliver was fatally wounded.
Jacobus said Knight, with a bullet still lodged in the back of her neck, died a week later in hospital when she decided to switch off machines keeping her daughter alive.
A while after the shooting, Jacobus said a man she had never seen before arrived at her house. “He said Staggie said he must come from Mitchells Plain to tell me he’s (Staggie) very sorry for what happened. But it’s not him.”
Jacobus, a mother of eight, said the incident had unnerved her because it was clear her address was widely known.
The shooting at her house last month scared her and her family further.
“We’re forever peeping through the window to see nobody’s coming... After Chantelle was raped I used to have nightmares about the Hard Livings shooting at us. Now the nightmares are coming back,” Jacobus said.
A court judgment on the rape said Knight had become a police informant and Staggie, to restore his trust in her, had her gang-raped.
She had been 17 at the time.
On Tuesday Jacobus said after the rape and kidnapping case, Knight had remained in witness protection for a few months. “But she missed us. We had no contact with her and could only see her when we met at (arranged venues). We didn’t know where she stayed.”
When Knight returned to Manenberg, Jacobus said her family feared for Knight’s safety. “We worried about her all the time.”
A few weeks before the shooting she said Knight had slept over with her boyfriend in Hard Livings territory for a few nights. “I said I’m going to fetch her because they’re going to kill her,” Jacobus said.
Her premonition became a reality on June 30 when Knight and Oliver planned to sleep at his cousin’s house in Hard Livings territory.
Knight and Oliver started walking to the cousin when Knight overheard a man nearby saying “there’s the Staggie witness”.
“She told me everything while she was in hospital. They got worried so turned to come back,” Jacobus said.
A man had stopped the couple and asked for a cigarette.
Then he tried to delay them and prevent them from walking further.
They were then shot at.
“First she was shot in the back. She fell. Then her boyfriend was shot. She was then shot in the head,” Jacobus said.
“After a while she tried to see if she could move.”
Knight crawled to a friend’s home nearby and named one of the gunmen.
“When she was in the ambulance she asked if her boyfriend was okay. I lied and said yes. She prayed with me, for her six children, I saw tears come to her eyes. I saw the blood and a small hole in her head,” Jacobus said.
Two men were arrested for the shooting.
Because Knight told her what had happened, Jacobus believed those linked to the men who shot her daughter would try and silence her. “I heard they want to hijack me. We can’t sleep. We live in fear.”
caryn.dolley@inl.co.za
Cape Times