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It's the time of year when most people look forward to spending time with loved ones but there will be little festive cheer in Francis Meniers' home in Bishop Lavis, Cape Town. The 41-year-old mom is consumed by feelings of guilt, longing and all-consuming worry about what could’ve happened to her baby girl.
“Why didn’t I pay attention? I could’ve stopped it,” she says.
Two-month-old Kai-Isha was taken by a stranger one fateful day April, a day Francis will rue for the rest of her life. The woman offered to buy essentials for her baby and it had been so long since anyone had been generous towards her that she believed the woman had only good intentions.
Francis has struggled for years to keep her head above water. She and her husband, Faiek (45), are raising six children in a one-room Wendy house.
“I needed the help," Francis says.
She'd gone to a local shopping centre with Kai-Isha when the woman, who appeared to be pregnant, approached her. She told Francis she wanted to buy nappies, facecloths and a can of formula for her baby.
To Francis, it felt as if an angel had been sent her way. They went from one shop to another and before long the woman was carrying Kai-Isha in her arms.
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When they got to the last shop, Francis told the woman she was popping in to get a few things while the kind stranger waited outside with her child. That was the last time Francis saw her baby.
Francis feels hopeless and abandoned. She almost never leaves the house anymore, apart from walking to the police station to ask if there’s been any progress with the case. Each time, she gets the same response: there’s no news. Her baby and the kidnapper have vanished without a trace.
Shortly after the incident, police established that the woman had got into a car, probably an Uber, with Kai-Isha in her arms. About two months later, there was a glimmer of hope when police arrested a suspect in nearby Elsies River who resembled Francis' description of Kai-Isha’s kidnapper.
Francis rushed to the police station, only to discover the suspect wasn’t the same person. After that, the investigation ground to a halt.
Though the family are struggling to make ends meet, Francis is too afraid to go out to look for work.
“What if the police show up and I’m not here? Though it almost never happens, it might just happen when I’m not home. It’s not as if I don’t want to work at all – I just feel I can’t go to work now.”
Desperate for answers, she’s even approached the Western Cape police’s ombudsman in the hope of getting the police to make more of an effort with the investigation.
“Every time I go to the police station, they tell me they don’t have answers for me. They can’t even tell me how far the investigation is.”
The last time police came to her house was to deliver the results of a lie-detector test. There’d been rumours that Francis might’ve sold her own child and police questioned her about this.
The tests show she wasn't hiding anything. But the allegations are driving her crazy and she feels as if people are blaming her. "Everyone in the community looks at me funny. They feel it’s my fault my child was kidnapped.”
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Baby Kai-Isha was born on Francis’ birthday, 23 February. It’ll be her first birthday soon and the date looms ominously for the family. What if their baby can’t spend her first birthday with them?
Francis fears she wouldn’t even recognise her baby if she were to see her now. By now, she’s probably eating on her own, crawling and maybe even taking her first wobbly steps.
“I’m missing out on all those things. I’m afraid of 23 February. It’s supposed to be our special day. I’m scared of what I might do to myself,” Francis says, tears streaming down her face.
When she wakes up in the morning, she’s intensely aware she only has six of her seven children with her. She misses the days when she’d feed Kai-Isha in the morning, before bathing her and then washing her clothes.
The nearest she now gets to her baby’s clothes is when she’s looking for something in the same set of drawers where her other children’s clothes are.
“The children want to know why her clothes are with theirs. I asked them to leave them there. At least then I can touch her clothes.”
- Police spokesperson Sergeant Wesley Twigg says there have been no new developments in the case, which is still under investigation.
