Two women friends, one a visitor in the other’s home, boldly went on the offensive and confronted two armed robbers who had returned to complete what they started the previous night.
Elize Stephens and her friend, Andrea Daniels, were in Stephen’s Westdene, Johannesburg home when two masked men, armed with guns, suddenly appeared before them in spite of an electric fence.
“They told me to raise my arms, which I did; Daniels ran to the kitchen and grabbed a kitchen knife that she tried to use to stab one of the men who chased her, but she was unsuccessful.”
Recounting their ordeal at the hands of the robbers, the duo said the men, one armed with a pistol and the other with a spanner, were very aggressive and kept grabbing at their arms as they wrestled with them.
“They pistol-whipped me a few times,” Daniels said, but I refused to take the robbery lying down and something inside me told me to fight back.
“I was prepared to be shot, I was prepared to die.”
And she was very nearly killed as, during their scuffle, the man shot at her but luckily missed. The bullet hit a fountain in Stephens’s garden, she said.
Daniels eventually fled and sliced her arm open on a palisade fence, a wound that needed four stitches, as she leapt over Stephens’s exterior fence with the knife still in her hand
The previous night, Elize Stephens had been alarmed when her Rhodesian ridgeback started barking inside her home.
“He went crazy, he never barks,” she said as she recalled.
She alerted her security company, ADT, to the threat and they discovered there were signs of entry over the electric fence, but the men were nowhere to be seen.
The next day, her friend Daniels went to stay to keep her company as she was nervous. It was then the armed robbers turned up and the women decided to confront them head on.
Though they survived their ordeal, the two friends were marked. They spotted large, dark bruises on their arms from the men grabbing them, and Stephens still struggles to breathe because her attacker kicked her in the ribs.
“I just want to say thank you to ADT and the Westdene police, who were absolutely fantastic,” said Stephens.
Both women are receiving counselling for trauma, and Stephens is taking tranquillisers to help her to sleep.
“For the first time in my life I’m scared in my own house,” Stephens said.
Daniels said they had decided to talk about their experience to canvass opinion about what the best response was to violent crime.
“It’s a debate: Does one fight back or not?” she asked.
The robbers made off with a laptop, a cellphone, handbags and Stephens’s ID book and bank cards.