Barely a few months after tracing her only son who had run away, a Zimmerman woman found her entire household cleared out.
On Thursday last week, while she was out with her returned minor son, her house was broken into and all belongings taken away in a canter truck. It was broad daylight.
Her furniture—sofas, tables, chairs, beds—were gone. So were kitchen appliances and utensils. Even the bed sheets were gone.
It was as though she had moved away; her one-bedroom house was stripped bare.
“It is like I’m starting life afresh. I don’t even have basic utensils to prepare food for my son,” she said.
She told the Star she learned of the robbery late in the day when a neighbour called her to ask why she was moving from the estate without telling anyone.
And the person who broke in, she said, was known to her as a friend.
The suspect, she said, had come to the estate with a canter truck and requested the gate man to be allowed in.
“Being that the caretaker also knows the man, he gave him the gate key and the man proceeded to my house and took all my things,” she said.
She said she learned the identity of the suspect through CCTV surveillance footage maintained at the estate.
She claimed the suspect ran a store in the trading centre.
Police are investigating, she said, and detectives have been trailing suspects with digital technology.
"Even now I'm from one of the searches because officers said they spotted a signal from the suspect's phone," she told the star.
The mother said she's confident she will find her belongings "because I'm satisfied the police are active".
Her only son ran away from home a few months ago and she thought he didn't want to go to school. He also fled in June 2019.
(Edited by V. Graham)
