Why Weren't We Enough?

The daughter of the woman who abducted Micaela Hunter tells Joanie Bergh she wants answers from her mother about why she did it.

- Joanie Bergh

SHE remembers the day as if it were yesterday: her mother returning home with a baby girl wrapped in pink blankets – bringing her the little sister she’d always wanted.

She was so excited, Amber Botha recalls. For months the five year-old had been placing her hands on her mother’s stomach and rubbing it in anticipation while her mom told her all about the baby that was on its way.

The little girl her mom brought home that day in May 1994 had downy curls and blue eyes. Her name was Shannon, her mother said, and Amber fell in love with her straight away.

But as excitement mounted in the Johannesburg home, disbelief and despair filled a house not too far away. Bruce and Alison Hunter had returned home empty-handed from hospital – their baby had been taken by a woman who’d said she wanted to use her for a bath demonstration for new moms. She never returned.

Shannon was actually Micaela Hunter, the newborn snatched from Johannesburg’s Mary mount Maternity Unit in what would become one of the most publicised kidnapping cases in SA.

Sonja Combrink (then 24), Amber’s mother, was eventually found guilty of stealing the 17-hour-old baby and raising her as her own child for two years.

Amber doted on her baby “sister” but everything changed when “Shannon” went away and her mom was sent to prison. Now for the first time Amber is speaking out about her childhood – and how she still hasn’t been able to shake the feeling she was never quite good enough for her mom. Why else would she have to steal another baby?

AMBER (28) is now a mom of two little girls – one aged four and the other 14 months. She doesn’t want to disclose their names though. This is her story, she says, and she’d rather they weren’t identified.