[Eldorado Park is a predominantly coloured area, and judging by the names, the accused and the victim are coloured. News headlines in other newspapers state that the 12-year-old was tortured to death.

Violence just keeps getting worse… because criminals have nothing to fear. Note how angry the coloured people in this area are. On my website I cannot even begin to document how many children are murdered in South Africa daily. I can only pick out the worst incidents that come up in the news. Extreme violence – despite Govt claims of falling crime – continues – and many times, the thieves steal very little – but they kill someone in the process for almost no reason. Jan]

By Sheree Russouw

There is a haunting tremble in Wilma Isaaks’s voice as she describes her gruesome discovery of her beloved 12-year-old daughter’s battered body.

“I just can’t get my daughter’s terrible screams out of my head,” she says. “I can’t forgive myself. I wasn’t there to save her.”

Her daughter Jermaine cried desperately for help as she was tortured inside the matchbox RDP home she shared with her mother in Devland, near Eldorado Park outside Johannesburg. But her screams compelled her killer to stuff her school socks into her mouth to silence her.

‘My daughter meant everything to me’
The brutal slaying of Jermaine on February 23 shocked the community of Eldorado Park, but the death of the school prefect – “a lovely child” – has barely made headlines.

Police arrested a suspect this week, and angry neighbours of 30-year-old Christian “Kappie” Schalkwyk are believed to have smashed the windows of his home.

The suspect lived just three streets away from Jermaine and her mother in a rundown area of Eldorado Park. Schalkwyk’s girlfriend was a family friend of the Isaaks, and the night before Jermaine’s death, the girlfriend had asked Isaaks if her unemployed partner could tidy Isaaks’s yard.

Schalkwyk is now accused of binding Jermaine’s hands and feet with a cellphone charger cord and tying her to her bed. He then allegedly bashed in her skull.

The suspect then apparently covered the child’s bloodied body in a pretty duvet cover, almost as if he wanted to hide it. Then he left Jermaine to die.

‘What kind of monster would do this to a defenceless child?’
When Isaaks returned home from work that evening, she found her daughter barely breathing. She rushed Jermaine to the local fire station, for help – but it was too late. The school prefect whom her friends describe as “lovely and bubbly” was dead.

After an anguished two-week wait, police finally arrested Schalkwyk this week, apparently having found him hiding in his sister’s home in Westbury, west of Johannesburg.

“We knew this man,” says the stunned Isaaks, a sales controller. “All he took was my DVD, Jermaine’s cellphone and our CD player. Why didn’t he just take that stuff and leave my baby alone?”

Isaaks, a single mother, says she and her daughter were best friends. “She was so lovely, and such an open child. My daughter meant everything to me. There were no secrets between us.

“I can have 10 or 20 children, but none will ever be as close to me as my Jermaine. I had just bought her a tracksuit for Valentine’s Day. She never even got the chance to wear it.”

For the shocked pupils who were friendly with Jermaine at Eldridge Primary School, the playground is no longer the same without “Mainie”. A group of her close friends are still receiving counselling to help them cope with her death.

“It’s not nice to go to school anymore,” says 12-year-old Miche Jantjies, Jermaine’s best friend.

“I keep on thinking that Jermaine is absent or that she just went on holiday. But then it all comes back to me and I remember that she is dead.”

Principal Isaac Fernandis described the murder as “one more act of senseless violence” carried out with impunity in his community.

Jermaine’s outgoing personality and keen sense of leadership, he says, meant she was well-loved at school. She was skilled at netball and her love of singing made her a valued member of the school choir. “She had so much potential. What kind of monster would do this to a defenceless child?”.

Like Jermaine, most of the 1 000 pupils at Eldridge are from “needy homes”, Fernandis says.

“Our parents don’t have the money to pay school fees and would rather put a meal on their tables. But even though Jermaine’s mother was often out of work and Jermaine really had nothing, she didn’t just sit down and act as if the world owed her.”

If the sense of grief in this community is profound, so is the ability to forgive.

“People have reached boiling point because this kind of violence against children is a common trend,” says Jermaine’s teacher Wenda Knipe.

“But as much as we are angry and we hate this man’s deed, he also needs our prayers.”

For Wilma, who buried her daughter in Upington last Saturday, home will never be the same. “I don’t know if I want to go back. Even if we protect our children, we can’t stay with them all the time.”

Schalkwyk appeared in the Protea magistrate’s court this week on charges of murder and robbery. Police are still investigating whether he raped Jermaine. He was remanded until March 15.

This article was originally published on page 3 of The Independent on Saturday on March 12, 2005

Source: IOL
URL: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click…/p>