Lonehill resident, Cairns, was stopped in peak hour traffic on Main Road by Magaliessig on the bridge over the N1 Western Pass at 5.45pm on 9 July. A man smashed her window, grabbed her handbag and disappeared under the bridge.
Cairns said, “It happened so quickly and I didn’t register what was happening straight away. I just screamed loudly and I didn’t know what to do. This is the first time that something like this has ever happened to me.” She suspects the man used a spark plug to shatter her window.
Metro police were policing cars that were driving on the hard shoulder to avoid the traffic about 100m away from Cairns’ incident. “Afterwards, I drove into the hard shoulder and told the Metro police what had happened. They said they would see if they could find the man,” said Cairns.
She later opened a case at Douglasdale Police Station.
Caxton’s research into community involvement in the Fourways area revealed that most people in the community are increasingly isolated with community involvement standing at only 55 percent. However, Cairns was grateful that the motorist behind her also pulled into the hard shoulder to offer her help.
Cairns raised suspicion that the criminal could be one of the vagrants from the area. Ward 106 councillor Stephen Moore admitted that vagrants did pose a challenge to the Magaliessig and Bryanston areas with vagrants inhabiting vacant plots and abandoned properties. Moore said he had escalated the issue to the regional director for urban management in Region E but said the city’s current policies and processes were not effective in resolving the problem of vagrants and the potential crime they pose.
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