A six-year-old girl was shot in the head by a gangster while playing outside her house in Lavender Hill.
Little Nathlia Pienaar was playing her favourite game skipping rope when rival skollies started shooting on Saturday at 9:30am.
The Grade R pupil was still clutching her skipping rope, when her bloodied body was found by her panicked family, minutes after the shooting.
Nathlia was declared brain-dead on arrival at the Red Cross Children’s Hospital.
She died seven hours later, surrounded by her grieving family.
Aunt Natasha Davids heard gunshots.
Relatives described the little girl as a loving, bubbly child who loved to dance.
Her uncle, Ryan Kruger, 24, was also shot and wounded in the leg during the incident and taken to a nearby hospital.
Residents say mounting tensions between the feuding Mongrels and the Fast Guns gangs continue to terrorise their community in spite of the recent deployment of the army to help curb gang violence on the Cape Flats.
Nathlia’s distraught aunt, Natasha Davids, told the Weekend Argus she was preparing to bath a group of children at their home when she heard the gunfire.
She says a few moments later she heard her aunt screaming for her brother Ryan after gunshots went off.
But when she ran outside, it was Nathlia she saw sprawled on the ground.
“You could see that she had tried to get off the streets when the shots rang out, but she was caught by one of them. These animals just kept on shooting, even while kids were outside.
“Never in my worst nightmares did I think I would find her lying on her back, still clutching her skipping rope while blood
poured down her face from the head wound,” the hartseer aunt says.
Nathlia died at Red Cross Children’s Hospital. File image
Nathlia’s mother, Natalie, 28, said by the time she arrived, her daughter was surrounded by people praying for her.
“Everyone wanted to put their hands on her and kept saying she would live, and I held on to those words during the ambulance ride to the hospital.
“She kept mumbling ‘Puma, Puma’ in the ambulance; that’s what she called her granny who died in December. And after those words, she never spoke again.
“My baby will never get to Grade 1; they took that from her and her from me,” the heartbroken mother said.
Police spokesperson, Sergeant Noloyiso Rwexana, said cases of murder and attempted murder were registered for investigation with no arrests made so far.