Helesti Daye-Fourie never leaves her house after dark. The risk of being carjacked and shot standing in her own driveway is too high.
Every day after picking up her eight-year-old son from school, the Johannesburg mum-of-two takes a different route home, eyes on the rear-view mirror. Her 20-month-old toddler sits in his car seat behind her, where he can easily be grabbed at a moment’s notice.
That’s because Ms Day-Fourie doesn’t want her son, in the event of an attack, to be trapped by his seatbelt, dragged along outside of the car and killed — as happened to a four-year-old boy whose parents and sister were forced out of their car by three armed men in nearby Boksburg, just 30 minutes away.
In Centurion, an hour’s drive away, a two-year-old was shot in the head during an attempted carjacking earlier this year.