NOW I CAN GRIEVE

Bernadette is hugely relieved to have been cleared of running over her son on the family farm

- JACQUES MYBURGH

IT ATE away at her. Day and night, the pain, guilt and self-loathing consumed her –her three-year-old son was dead and everyone believed it was all her fault. She was the one who’d driven over him.

“It cut me to the bone when I picked up the newspaper and read that I was the one who’d killed my child,” Bernadette Small tells YOU.

Her son, AJ, was outside playing on the family farm near Koppies in the Free State on that fateful day in 2017. A short while later he was found lying unconscious and badly injured in the driveway. He died soon afterwards.

Nobody witnessed the tragic event and because Bernadette (31) had got behind the wheel of her car shortly before it happened, she and everyone else assumed that she’d run him over. On top of it all, she found herself facing a charge of culpable homicide.

It was a nightmare – and making it worse was the fact that people would phone to tell her she was a bad mother. She also had to walk around knowing the whole community was gossiping about her.

But in the back of her mind was the constant nagging question, “How could I run over my child and not even notice it?”

She doesn’t know what would’ve become of her if it hadn’t come to light that she’d been wrongfully accused.

There were things that just didn’t make sense, so the family hired a private detective to investigate. And what he found would eventually lift the heavy burden of self-blame and guilt.