One of the four bodies discovered in Macassar recently has been identified.
The Daily Voice can reveal that the body of a woman who was found floating in the water at Macassar Beach last month is that of 23-year-old Sherileen “Poppie” Esak from Voorbrug in Delft.
The mother of two was spotted in the early hours of May 27, floating in a shallow pool.
Her shocked mother Susan, 58, says she doesn’t know how her daughter ended up dead on the beach.
“Her boyfriend came to tell us that she was missing that Friday [May 26],” she explains
“He said that she got into a car at the garage at Zevenwacht Mall.”
It is believed that Poppie was offered money or food to leave with a man.
“Hulle skarrel mos, the man probably told her he is going to give her something because the boyfriend also said when he turned around, he didn’t see her again,” Susan adds.
The devastated ma claims that the boyfriend’s mother put out a missing person’s poster of Poppie on Facebook, adding that her child had a tattoo, ‘Poppie Gaza’, on her leg.
Susan also says a woman who read the post online alerted police about the tattoo, and last week the family had the difficult task of identifying Poppie at the morgue.
Susan says that her daughter had been living on the street with her berk at the time of her disappearance.
“She would just come at night for food and then she would leave again.
“Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for months, she and her boyfriend lived on the road or at any broken house,” she explains.
The Daily Voice visited the mother at their residence in Voorbrug on Sunday.
Susan says that Poppie’s death had been another huge blow for her family, as they had buried her husband just six months ago.
“She has got a son who is five years old and a daughter who is turning two years old. I am broken,” the hartseer mother says.
Russell Williams from the Macassar Community Policing Forum (CPF) added that the discovery of dumped bodies has become a major concern for the community.
“We have beefed up our neighbourhood watches across Macassar, together with the CPF and the South African Police Service but still these things happen,” Williams said.
“Whenever load shedding is over, somebody gets discovered and the community is quite scared.”
byron.lukas@inl.co.za