In January 2015, 18-year-old Lukas Dirks was sitting in the sun on a pavement bouncing his feet in blue All Stars sneakers next to his friends and their pit bulls in Mitchells Plain. At 11.40 his mother, Natalie, was in the kitchen with her husband when she heard “a lot of gunshots, ‘soos een skietery’ [like one shooting], ring out.
She stops talking and her eyes blur. “I looked out and saw boys fall and ‘outjies’ [guys] running far away,” says Natalie, who was in her pyjamas after working a late shift at the Taj Mahal hotel in Cape Town. She shouted to her sister, who lives three houses away: “Lukas has been shot!”
Her sister Chrystel ran over to the boy. “Lukas was lying there and said: ‘Here, help my [God, help me],” she recalls. He died in the ambulance on the way to Lentegeur Hospital. “We never even said goodbye,” says Chrystel, reaching for her sister’s hand.
Natalie is the eighth of nine applicants in a historic class action application lodged by Gun Free South Africa in the Western Cape High Court on Tuesday on behalf of families whose children were killed on injured by SAPS's “Prinsloo guns” — to compensate them and hold SAPS accountable for gun management.
We heard bang-bang-bang and my four-year-old grandson just took off running, dropping his sweets
— Chrystel Dirks, resident of Mitchell's Plain
Bent cop Col Christian Prinsloo and accomplices, including Col David Naidoo, smuggled more than 2,000 police guns across South Africa, including into the hands of gang syndicates on the Cape Flats between 2007 and 2015. As of 2016, more than 1,000 of them were still missing.
At least 1,066 people were killed with “Prinsloo guns”, including 67 children, Gun Free SA reports. The murders have been “forensically linked’ to 888 of these guns.
Lukas is believed to be one of the victims.
“We never had a loss before Lukas,” says Natalie, 43. When he was shot, one of his brothers was only seven years old. “He would not go to school for two weeks and was sitting at home waiting. We never realised that he thought Lukas was coming back,” she says.
In a chef’s uniform ahead of her hotel shift, Natalie says that Lukas was a good son who left school to earn money for the family through casual work after her husband was diagnosed with cancer. He died on September 14 2016.
“Lukas was the main breadwinner. He was a slim kind [clever child], always curious,” says his mother. When asked if he associated with gangsters, she shakes her turbaned head vehemently: “Nooit! [never], not at all.”
The family had a detective visit them and “never come back again”.
“Lukas was robbed of his life. Every day I think about him and I carry my heartache in my hand,” his mother says.
Control of the entire firearms management chain in SAPS is broken
— Gun Free South Africa director Adele Kirsten
Chrystel says she doesn’t feel safe walking with children on the streets. “Just last week I took my grandchildren to the shop to buy R3 sweets for them. We heard bang-bang-bang and my four-year-old grandson just took off running, dropping his sweets.”
Residents check community chat groups before they send someone to the shops, says Lynn Phillips, secretary of the Cape Flats Safety Forum.
Tears streamed down the face of Marche Karelse when she stood up to speak at the Gun Free SA event on Wednesday to mark the class action application. “On Monday afternoon I could not enter my gates because of a body... Manenberg is a red zone. People are dying, we see perpetrators every day with guns in their hands.”
Two of the applicants also struggled to talk about their pain this week, lighting candles for the victims of gun violence at the launch at the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation. Melanie Kiel’s 17-year-old son, Dudley Richards, was fatally wounded, and Rasheid Andrew’s son was injured in shootings believed to be with “Prinsloo guns”.
Gun Free SA director Adele Kirsten said at the launch it was clear that “control of the entire firearms management chain” in SAPS was broken. “This failure enabled someone like Prinsloo to put guns into the hands of criminals.
“This action is an act of hope, an opportunity to change,” she said, to a chorus of support from women wearing red Moms Move for Justice T-shirts.
Kirsten appealed to police minister Bheki Cele to:
- meet the families, say sorry, and make amends;
- fix the SAPS firearms management system; and
- go after the missing Prinsloo guns and all illicit guns.
Law firm Norton Rose Fulbright is has taken on the case pro bono. Wim Trengove is senior counsel. Director Jason Whyte said: “We know who some of the victims of the 'Prinsloo guns' are from SAPS’s own records and we are bringing the case for these people as well as the unnamed victims...
“By SAPS's own records the Prinsloo firearms did cause the deaths of a large number of people.”
The Western Cape High Court must certify the class action as being in the interests of justice and that there is a plausible claim in terms of which the minister of police is liable to members of the public who suffered loss due to shooting with a Prinsloo firearm for the case to proceed.
Dirks says: “The reason I joined this court case is that I don’t want this to happen to the next person.”
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