‘SHE WANTED TO DIE'

Bystanders tell of the trauma of a little boy whose mom drove their car into the ocean

- ROBYN LUCAS

IT WAS a hot afternoon and with beaches closed because of lockdown restrictions, he decided to take his grandchildren to a clifftop lookout point with spectacular views over the Indian Ocean twinkling tantalisingly below.

Hopefully a sea breeze would provide some relief from the stifling heat, he thought.

Little did Anton Gerber know what awaited him. As he was driving along with Liam (12) and Tyler (4), he saw a small boy, his face streaked with tears and sweat, waving frantically from the side of the road.

When he got closer, Anton saw the child had blood on his face and was clutching his ribs.

“I stopped the car and he asked me if I could please help him. I asked him what was wrong and he said his mom and sister were in the ocean,” says Anton, who lives in Herolds Bay on the Garden Route in the Western Cape and had been on his way to the notorious Voëlklip cliff.

“I thought he meant they’d been washed off the rocks, but the boy told me they drove off the cliff.”

Anton told the eight-year-old boy to get in the car and a few minutes later they arrived at the viewpoint. They got out of the vehicle and made their way to the cliff, which is about 120m above the sea. The boy showed Anton where his mom had parked, and he saw tyre tracks leading from the parking area to the lookout point.

“When I looked over the cliff, I could see his mom floating in the water,” he says. The wreckage of her car, a white Fiat, was also visible.

Stunned, he asked the boy what had happened. “He said, ‘My mom wanted to die.’ Those were his words.