Failed by the law — parents’ desperate search for son ends in shallow stream

Thursday, 28 February, began as a normal day for the Gontsana family. Erik Gontsana went to work as a taxi driver, while his wife, Beatrice, stayed at home with their 12-year-old son, Sanele.

Just hours later, they would be frantically searching the streets of Mshengu township in Orange Farm, approximately 40km south of Johannesburg, looking for Sanele.

The desperate search ended a week later, on Thursday, 5 March, when Sanele’s naked and partially burnt body was found in a narrow stream of water, a few kilometres from the family home.

Sanele lived with a disability that left him unable to speak and had delayed his development, leaving him small in stature for his age.

“But he loved people. He was always laughing, always smiling. Everybody here knew him as a happy child,” said Beatrice.

Sanele was prone to elopement (a tendency to wander away unexpectedly), a behaviour associated with his disability. The day he went missing, Sanele wandered from the yard, and his mother found out that he had been playing at a family friend’s home a street away.

“ I WhatsApped the person whose house I thought he was at, and they told me that he was there, but he just left. The child from that house said he accompanied Sanele to the corner and watched him walk to our house. I went to the gate to look for him, but I could not see him,” said Beatrice.

Her voice shaking, Beatrice said she then looked for him at a garage where he often wandered, but still did not find him.

“That's when I started to stress. I looked everywhere, I think I travelled the whole of Orange Farm looking for him, but I could not find him. I searched from a quarter-to-one until I lost all strength at about four when I realised I had looked everywhere but was failing to find him. I asked people in the community if they had seen him, but nobody had,” she said.

She then went to the police station and filed a missing person’s report.

“The police came to my house and helped search for Sanele that same night, but we could not find them. Since then, the police have not come back.”

According to Beatrice and Erik, police had promised to deploy a K9 unit to assist in the search, but it never arrived. The family also requested a door-to-door search, but said the police declined, explaining that a court order would be required to enter private homes without consent.

“Everything I wanted them to do as Sanele’s mother was never done. I feel like I have been failed,” she said tearfully.

Possible ransom request

Following a weekend of fruitless searching and a frustrating lack of police support, on Monday, Beatrice went to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto to look for her son.

While she was there, she received a message from someone who claimed to have Sanele. The person wrote in isiXhosa, “Ingako ngeke ngimbulala angsiyona mbulali, ngingudriver kuphela.” (I won’t kill him, I’m not a murderer, I’m just a driver).

The man asked for the location of the family’s home and R200 in petrol so he could drop Sanele off.

Beatrice’s requests for proof of life went ignored.

On Monday and Tuesday, the alleged kidnapper kept communicating with Beatrice, claiming he had Sanele. Then, on Wednesday, there was no communication. On Thursday, the man sent a message claiming Sanele was not well and was experiencing laboured breathing.

The 12-year-old’s body was found later that day. A neighbour alerted the family that a body had been found in a small stream near a railway track just a few kilometres from the family home. At first, they did not believe it was Sanele, but went to check anyway.

“When we got there, we saw that it was, in fact, our child. There were police there who didn’t want me to go near the body, but I told him that’s my son,” said Erik.

His family said that Sanele’s arm had been broken, parts of his body were charred, and his teeth were missing. They are still waiting for the results of a postmortem.

He was not wearing anything aside from the shoes Beatrice had put on his feet the day he went missing.

“We searched this area many times, but he was not there. I knew very well they dumped his body that very day,” said Erik.

A house two doors away from the clearing leading to the stream has surveillance cameras, which Erik believes may have recorded the person who dumped Sanele’s body. However, he said the family has yet to receive any response after asking police to secure the footage.

Beatrice alerted the police to the messages when she first received them. She said a detective cautioned her against assuming the anonymous sender had her son, warning that it could have been an opportunist attempting to extort money from the family.

“But this person was not asking me for thousands; they were just asking for R200. At the time, I thought maybe they were just trying to help,” she said.

“I feel like if the police had taken this seriously, if they had agreed to the door-to-door search, if only they had agreed to trace the number, Sanele would be here with us today,” said Beatrice.

Daily Maverick asked the South African Police Service for comment, but had not received a response by the time of publication. DM