It’s a miracle KAVISHA SEEVNARAIN is alive - not many people fall 60 metres into ankle-deep water and live.
The 26-year-old Durban schoolteacher was hijacked in Pinetown on Friday 13 November, bundled into another car and driven around while her captors drew money from her account at ATMs and drank at a shebeen. Later they threw her off the Mkomazi Bridge, obviously intending to murder her. The brutal thugs no doubt believed she wouldn’t survive a fall equivalent to being hurled from a 20-storey building.
But she did. Yet she’ll be in hospital for at least a month for treatment to her shattered pelvis, seven broken ribs, fractured vertebrae and torn renal artery.
“Those bastards did this to my little girl,” her father, Jeewan, says angrily at her bedside. “If they wanted her car they could have taken it. Why did they have to throw her off the bridge as well?”
Kavisha’s brother, Kavesh, a doctor, said two things probably saved her. First, she didn’t lose consciousness; if she had she would probably have drowned, even in the shallow water. Second, the tide was out; if it had been in she might have been swept out to sea.
Speaking with difficulty Kavisha recalled the terror of being dragged to the edge of the bridge. “I grabbed the railing and begged them to pull me up. They just kept kicking my hands. They were laughing. Then I was falling and I could still hear them laughing.”
She hit the shallow water hard but adrenaline blocked the pain of her broken bones. She dragged herself to the riverbank and screamed for help. A passerby eventually found her and called police.
Kavisha’s father believes criminals should pay for their actions. “If the legal system doesn’t make these animals pay I promise I will do whatever I must to ensure they don’t get away with what they’ve done,” he says.
