Facing death at dawn
It was part farce, part torture, and completely terrifying from start to finish. Sunday Times assistant editor Patrick Bulger recounts his ordeal when three men broke in, held him at gunpoint and ransacked his house
‘We don’t want to kill you!” A man in a grey tsotsi beanie has his hand on my neck, pushing me down onto the bed. He’s pointing a large gun at my head, and I am aware too of two other thugs entering the room, past the glass sliding door I opened for Lucy the cat an hour earlier. It is about 7.30 in the morning, and my heart thumps, almost audibly, as grey beanie and a smaller, bearded guy in green flight overalls tie me up, feet together and hands behind my back. The guy in overalls is also armed. Just minutes earlier I was asleep, but now I’m alert, thrust into a waking nightmare, trying hard to swallow, trying to accept the awful reality of my predicament. My house has been invaded, and my life is on the line.
Mostly, I cannot believe this is happening to me, on an otherwise beautiful, if overcast, Joburg Tuesday morning. It’s beyond shocking. It seems unbelievable. I think, shit, this is it, this is the thing that so many others have had to endure, in homes in busy suburbs, on isolated farms, in schools, in hospitals, and even in homes for the aged. This is what it feels like. Many do not survive. Who living in SA does not dread this?
Grey beanie repeats that they don’t want to kill me, but if that is meant to reassure, it doesn’t. I dwell on its latent menace and ask myself, is this going to be the day I die?
There’s commotion all about, with the other two scoping the rest of the house out, while grey beanie is asking whether I live alone, and whether anyone is planning to come to the house that morning.
I’m lying on my stomach on the bed, and he’s sitting on the side of the bed, pointing the gun at me, and asking, “Where is your gun?” I say I don’t have one, and he sighs almost wearily as he rejects my answer. “Where is your gun?” he asks again, but this time really slowly, like I didn’t get it the first time. I say, look, I don’t have guns, OK? That’s it.
He seems to accept that, but then wants to know where my “jowels” are. I seriously don’t want to upset, offend, irritate my tormentor in any way, but I have to tell him, and I’m really very sorry about this, that I don’t know what “jowels” are. He’s impatient, like a teacher again, and says “your jowellery, watches”. Finally, I get it. I don’t have any of those, either, I tell him. “OK,” he says, “where is your safe?” As his luck would have it, I have two safes, both mostly empty, in a storeroom next to the bedroom.
I’ve decided that only co-operation will give me any chance of surviving this ordeal: acceptance of what is happening, patience, and a strategy of minimising any excitement, misunderstanding and, most of all, panic. On this mountain I will not die. Maybe.
Now they have to get to the safes, which are in the locked storeroom, the key of which is hidden behind a wire radio on top of a welsh dresser in the entrance hall. The potential for confusion is high. Plus, the alarm in the storeroom is armed, and will have to be disarmed if the armed reaction squad is not to arrive shortly, which I don’t really want to happen because I don’t want to die in a shootout.
They’re jittery at this overload of information, and I’m trying to tell grey beanie that there is a keypad above the bed, and that he must enter the number I give him to turn the alarm off. Lots of waving guns around, and “shhses”, all menace and threat.
Now the one in the pilot’s overalls takes centre stage, and cuts the Gordian knot of suburban house alarms, ignoring what I say about the code and ripping the keypad from the wall. There is a moment of silence, and then the shrill peal of the alarm shatters the morning quiet. Grey beanie looks at me, and I’m a bit exasperated, and I say, “Guy, now the alarm’s gone off.”
They can’t locate the keys to the storeroom to get to the alarm radio and siren, so it means I have to be allowed off the bed, bound at the ankles, and hop out the bedroom door, to the other side of the entrance hall to get the keys. I don’t have my glasses on, and everything seems blurry and fuzzy and weird. Flight overalls snatches the keys from me and opens the storeroom and the third member of their party, hitherto having played a walk-on part, jumps up on a workbench and pulls the whole alarm mechanism from the wall. “Well, now they’ll be on the way,” I say. Grey beanie is agitated and says I must phone the security company and tell them it’s a false alarm. He gets my phone from the bathroom where I’d left it the night before, and even without my glasses I can see there’s been a missed call from them. I call back, but the call is dropped, and I’m shaking so much I can barely hold the phone. I try again, and this time I get through, and explain that I set off the alarm by mistake. Standing right next to me, with his gun, grey beanie whispers, “Tell them it was the cat.” I don’t.
I’m feeling ultra cowardly now, and wonder whether I should push the guy and make a run for it. But I’m still tied at the ankles, so I decide not to, put off too by imagining myself lying in the garden, a pathetic pile of naked old white guy cowering in the ferns.
Grey beanie wants to know if my car has got satellite tracking. I say yes, and he explains that he’s going to take my car, go to the ATM at the garage (I give him directions), and draw whatever money he can from my account. He reluctantly accepts that it’ll be only “one thou”. Then he’s going to come back and pick up the other two, they’re going to load up my stuff, and they’re going to leave the car “not far away”. He tells me this a few times. It’s like a Famous Five outing for criminal degenerates.
I explain to him about the immobiliser, how he has to push a button under the ashtray. I’m worried it’s sounding like too much hard work, and that they’ll realise the better option may just be to shoot me, if only to keep me quiet. I dread having to tell him about the engine switch. It’s an added thing to remember and it may just tip him over the edge, but I have to tell him … anything to bring the nightmare to a quicker end.
I look in a drawer to find an old Toyota invoice on an A4 sheet of paper to write down my bank card PIN and I hand it to him, and he asks if it’s an important paper that I’ve given to him, that perhaps I
I think, shit, this is it … This is what it feels like