Police wreck property in raid
April 5 2014 at 03:21pm
By Philip Wilson
By Philip Wilson
Durban - A Greenwood Park couple face a
miserable weekend following a police raid that left windows broken, pipes smashed
and doors forced open.
A police unit raided a property in
Greenwood Park which has upstairs and downstairs apartments and in the process
bashed their way into the home of Vivianne Yan while she was asleep on Friday
afternoon.
Despite no resistance from Yan, the
police broke the door to her home, smashed pipes outside the building and
shattered windows with bricks.
“I heard a big noise outside. Many
people came with guns, and I was afraid because there were too many of them,”
Yan said.
She was left traumatised as her home
and the apartment above were raided simultaneously.
“It felt like the last time people
robbed me. I asked them what was happening but they didn’t answer me. I felt I
was going to die,” she said.
The officers searched through cupboards
and into the roof boards of the upstairs apartment ilooking for illicit
substances.
They even kicked a hole through an
unlocked door to one of the bedrooms in their zeal.
Gregory Pennington, whose mother and
aunt own the property, was left wondering who would be left to clean up the
mess.
“I arrived as they were leaving and I
tried to speak to them, but they were very rude to me and then just drove off,”
Pennington said.
He was astounded by the force that the
raid members used, and has concerns about how his family will be able to afford
to fix the broken property.
“My mom and my aunt are pensioners.
They’ve just had big problems with the house with water leaks that they’ve just
spent an enormous amount of money to fix. As a result they have not been able
to receive rent.
“How this affects them now, I don’t
know. How are they going to pay for these damages,” he said.
Costly
He believes that those responsible for
the damage should pay for the expensive repairs required.
“They’ve kicked open doors and broken
burglar gates and windows. It’s very costly, and I think that they should have
proper evidence if they are going to break things.
“I haven’t been to the police station
yet, but I’m going to go there and lay a charge on behalf of my parents,”
Pennington said.
As for Yan and her husband, they will
have to sleep somewhere else until their home is safe and their windows and
plumbing are fixed.
“They will have to be booked into a
hotel or otherwise they’d be sleeping in the cold,” Pennington said.
An SAPS spokesperson could not, at the
time of going to press, confirm that the incident had been reported.
Independent on Saturday
