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Every time a man’s body is found in the bushes somewhere around Eldorado Park, Ricardo Moses skips a heart beat.
This is a man who has for almost two years combed the bushes wide and far in search for his 27-year-old Jermaine Moses, who went missing in July 2015.
While still agonising about the loss and anxiously waiting to find closure, his second son, Justin Maskew, disappeared.
Justin was with his best friend, Thato Leroy Hansen, both 22, when they did not return home on February 24 this year.
Moses is now searching for his two boys and a friend of one of them.
Misery and pain is painted all over his face. He has all the questions but no answers on what could have happened to his sons and their whereabouts and wonders why this has happened to his family.
“It is too much to handle for my family to now lose another child while we were still searching for the other one,” Moses said.
“Sleeping and eating has been the hardest thing for me since Jermaine went missing and it has become worse now with Justin also gone. I have been to mortuaries and searched the bushes for months ... This whole thing is draining emotionally and physically,” he lamented.
He said he has tried to keep hoping they’d show up alive, but he ended up searching the bushes expecting to come across one of his sons’ bodies at some point. He said crime has taken its toll in Eldorado Park, with daily incidents of robberies and other crimes believed to be carried out by drug users trying to make a quick buck so they can buy more drugs.
Moses could not say if his sons were drug users but could not rule it out either. “Drug abuse is rife in my community and so is crime. The man who was last seen with Jermaine is in prison as we speak while other one, a known burglar, who came to fetch my son from home, has been in hospital injured,” he said.
“People are being robbed, beaten and sometimes murdered in our area. Anything could have happened to my boys,” he said with a lower voice.
Community members recently took the law into their own hands, hunting down criminals, which resulted in at least one death only a week ago. The deceased was accused by the community of being involved in the murder of Junaid Kirsten, whose body was found under a bridge.
Moses said mob justice was not the solution. “I do not support the idea of mob justice. Our children are caught in this web of drug abuse that leads them to commit all sorts of crime, but none of them deserves to die,” Moses said.
“All I want is to find my boys, dead or alive. My family needs to find closure ... We’re desperate.”
