St Luke’s Hospice in Grassy Park say they’ve been the target of relentless break-ins and vandalism for two weeks.
The most recent incident occurred ob Tuesday morning when skelms broke into the charity shop and stole equipment, and even walked off with their front door.
Nadia Emjedi, volunteer and day-care coordinator, said these break-ins are taking place regularly.
“They are doing it piece by piece. They started at the roof and have been going from one building to the next through the ceiling,” she says.
“There are no doors on the place anymore, we needed to take all our equipment, from wheelchairs to walkers, into our day care.
“We are trying to remove everything that they might take before they come back.
“We even took out the lights because we know they are going to return tonight (Tuesday night) because the doors are off.
“It started two weeks ago with the middle building that is attached to our charity shop, everything is stolen out of the middle building from lights to cupboards.
“Whatever they could take, they took.”
St Luke’s Combined Hospices provides specialised end of life medical and nursing care, known as palliative care, to people with life-limiting illnesses.
Nadia said the charity shop sells second-hand things to help raise funds for the day care.
“We had to phone all our patients and tell them the driver won’t be able to pick them up and they depend on coming out because we fetch them every Tuesday and we do activities, breakfast and lunch,” she says.
“We don’t know when we will be able to accommodate them again because now our day care is filled with the things we removed from our charity shop.
“We can’t believe it because it is people from our own area doing this.
“This hospice has been around for over 20 years and for this to happen now?
“The one day care that deals with terminally ill patients is still operational but they stole our security gate but didn’t get in, we are scared they are going to make a way soon.
“We do not have security because we were told by the ward councillor that they first need to put out a tender for a security company to take the job so we are not sure how long that will take.”
However, councillor Donovan Nelson said he is not aware of speaking to the hospice about security.
“My interaction was to make sure that the issue gets to law enforcement, we are aware of the break ins but they have not made a (SAPS) case yet.
“However I spoke to Law Enforcement to secure the building but there is not much we can do law wise unless a case has been made.”
Nadia says they did make a case. However, police did not reply to Daily Voice queries.