A woman’s body was found near a shopping centre in Lentegeur, Mitchells Plain, last night.
Lentegeur Police Station spokesperson, Const Navon van Houten, said the body was found in a shack near Devland Hyper shopping centre, late on Tuesday 20 January, which is alongside the railway line.
Drug paraphernalia near the body led passers by to believe that the woman had died of a drug overdose but Van Houten said that paramedics who attended the scene confirmed that the woman was being treated for tuberculosis and said that she had died of natural causes.
Witness recounts details
Devland Hyper night shift security guard, Roger Paulse was on duty when the body was found.
He said he knew the woman, who was about middle aged, and that her family lived near his home in Lentegeur. He said she used to fetch water at the store regularly but had not done so for a week or more. According to Paulse, the woman is a known drug user and her body was discovered by other users who frequent her shack. The men had approached him and asked him to call the police, he said, after they had discovered her body in the shack. He suspected that the woman had been dead for quite some time because her face had been partially eaten away by rats.
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“The guy just asked me to contact the police because they found the body in the hokkie and she was dead already. Maybe a week, two days, three days, I don’t know,” he said.
Precariousness of the shacks
Paulse says that this is not the first time that a woman’s body had been found in the shacks but nothing comes of the investigations into the deaths and the people who are living in the small informal settlement never come forward with information.
“Early last year a woman’s body was found burnt out. She was alone in one of those shacks,” Paulse said. “But nobody knows anything. When something happens then nobody knows nothing about what’s going on there. She could have been dead the whole week already but nobody knows or they knew but didn’t make contact with anybody.”
He added that most of the people who live in the small settlement are “heavily on drugs”.
“I didn’t even know she was dead because last week she still came to fetch water by us,” he said.
“That’s the last time I saw her.”
