A 15-year-old soccer player, Diego Cupido, was one of six teenagers shot in Mitchells Plain last Friday night.
This was the second shooting in Mitchells Plain this past week that resulted in multiple fatalities.
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‘I still feel like this is a dream I will wake up from and he will come walking through the door’ says Sarah Klaase, the grandmother of the late soccer player.
Diego and his friends were visiting a local park around 7pm on Friday when gunshots were heard in Bosduif Road.
A friend of the victims claimed that they all knew each other from school.
On this particular Friday, the shop was full, he said. As such, a few friends from the group stood in the park, waiting for the shop to empty.
He was busy making a fire when he heard around 16 gunshots, which he initially thought were ‘klappertjies.’
Screaming and chaos ensued.
The victims were Diego, Luke Middleway and Clayton Sterris.
The DailyVoice reports that two of the victims were standing away from the adults in order to smoke.
Another one of the friends claims to have seen them fall after the gunshots were heard. Their names were shouted to no avail. She went on to say that she saw Luke crawling towards her gate.
‘He crawled towards my house, it looked like his legs were shot, broken, there was so much blood, he just looked at us, we then rushed him to hospital.’
There are two accounts of the incidents from apparent witnesses. One source claimed that there was one shooter who parked his vehicle close to the park, approached the group of boys and opened fire.
Another source stated that there were two shooters on either side of the park who managed to corner the teenagers.
Pedro Klaase ‘Nana’, Diego’s aunt, explained that Diego had been raised by his grandmother, who rushed down the stairs when she heard what had happened.
‘I got there and he was just laying, bleeding,’ his last words were, ‘yes, Nana.’
The grandmother of the victim said that she had been anointing him all week. However, she thought it was God preparing him for a soccer journey, not the shooting.
She went on to say that he had dreams of pursuing soccer professionally.
‘It doesn’t feel real,’ she added.
Lieutenant-Colonel Malcolm Pojie, the police spokesperson, said that the Mitchells Plain SAPS opened three murder and three attempted murder cases for investigation.
As of yet, no arrests have been made.
Valerie Moses, a member of the Rocklands Neighbourhood Watch, said that a decision was made to close shops for business at 9pm.
She describes the decision as a proactive step because a lot of tragedies happen in and around these shops.
These teenagers were shot less than three days after another mass shooting which occurred in Tafelsig on Wednesday.
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