walk to Braamfontein and buy all kinds of drugs. They smoked a lot of weed; I think 11pm was lights out and they would all smoke in their room, open the window. And then Mariolette and Chris started realising what was going on – the victim kids were doing drugs. She took them to some sort of drug rehab in town, and they all had to have urine tests. Ben spat on his test. But the drugs just kept getting worse and worse.”
The Archivist’s wife was nodding.
“I really struggled. I had been in a clinic for three weeks because of the stress and when I came back, things were worse. Ben was drinking, taking drugs; he would go to clubs in the middle of town, but in like, really dodgy areas and his aggression was out of hand. Once his dad had to go and fetch him from the hostel because he was so drunk. He woke up here the next morning and had no idea how he had got here.”
Dad was nodding.
“The fact that he walked – because I’m not going to carry anybody – to the car and then up the stairs, got into bed, and he had no recollection of it … that was worrying.”
His wife continued.
“Ben punched doors, punched walls, screamed, like really screamed at us, I actually got scared.”
The Archivist added: “He’d also sit there, trying to get me to fight him. He would say, “Hit me, why don’t you hit me? Hit me.’ And I wouldn’t. I just wouldn’t.”
“Then he would say he loves fighting,” said Ben’s mom. “He absolutely loves it. And it all got too much for me. I felt responsible to a certain degree, so did my husband, because he’s at this school and we never knew what was going on. But then he tried to commit suicide and we had to focus on that.”
“What?” I was stunned.
The Archivist nodded his head.
“One night Ben tried to jump off a bridge near Ontdekkers and Gordon Road onto the highway … I don’t actually remember what led to it, but he got out of the car in frustration and I wasn’t going to say, ‘Well, sorry, get back in the car.’ His twin brother wanted to calm him down, but I said to him, ‘Just leave him. Let him walk home – he knows where he lives.’ It was bloody far away from there, but he knew where we lived. His brother insisted. He got out of the car and chased Ben while I stayed in the car, following as they went around corners, close enough, but keeping my distance so that Ben would stop running away. Eventually his twin called me and shouted, ‘Ben’s going to jump off the bridge!’ So I said, ‘Whatever you do, do not tell him not to jump.’ Ben is not scared – he has no fear, nothing – so if he said to Ben, ‘You’re not going to jump off that bridge,’ he would have jumped. I said, ‘Ask him what he wants to do … What does he want me to do?’ His twin said Ben wanted to go to his girlfriend’s house. I said, ‘Cool, I’ll drop him there.’ But that broke his brother – he was in tears. We decided then to send Ben to Beethoven Clinic near Hartbeespoort Dam, which is where my wife had been earlier in the year.”
“How did you manage,” I asked, “with your wife in hospital and your son on the absolute edge?”
“In a way, it was easier to manage because my wife was really affected by it. It was also about trying to manage her expectations and also trying to keep her in a good space, so having her there was a comfort in a sense that I felt like she was in a good space.”
I could understand that. It’s hard enough watching one person you love, suffer. Two must have been agony.
His wife interjected.
“So Ben went to Beethoven – and it was just before his matric exams, which was another concern. I spent hours, and I mean hours, trying to get Ben to write his matric at Hartbeespoort Hoërskool. I tried to get them firstly to go to Beethoven and just have somebody watch him. They agreed to that and then said no. We eventually got permission for him to write his exams at Hartbeespoort Hoërskool. But it was such a mission, and we were so worried about how we were going to get him there in the morning. Eventually my husband spoke to a teacher who fetched him and dropped him off. But, I mean, the days he would write, I would phone him in the morning, and ask him, ‘Are you okay?’ But he was so drugged up. I don’t know what they gave him there. He was on 14 different medications; he was taking 26 tablets a day. He sounded drunk from morning to night.”
In a way, he was.
“He was supposed to go for 21 days. So they did the drug rehab for 21 days, they did psych for another 21 days and he then stayed longer, so he was there for 52 days all in all. He wrote all of his exams there. He very nearly failed matric. When the results first came out, it looked as though Ben had failed Maths by one per cent and he failed, I think, Business by three per cent. So we asked for a remark on both subjects and fortunately he ended up passing his Maths. So that was matric – he passed … but only just.”
“How did he manage in court?”
Ben is the only boy who was required to testify as an adult. By the time the case came to trial, he was 18 so, even though he had been molested as a minor, he was now considered an adult and had to face his attacker in the courtroom. He wasn’t in a separate room like the others. He had to face Collan head-on.
“He coped very well,” The Archivist replied, “especially in the face of how the judge behaved with regards to the assault charges. Ben took the stand and he was interrogated by the defence attorney about how he had come to the total of 20 incidents of common assault. The defence asked him things like: ‘How do you know it was 20 times? How do you know this was happening? And do you have the exact dates? And what did he do? Weren’t you just fighting with each other?’
“Then the judge got involved and said, ‘But how do you get to 20?’ So Ben said, ‘It was more than 20 times.’ The judge then said, ‘Do you know the dates it took place?’ Ben said no. The judge continued, ‘But how do you know it was 20?’ Ben started trying to explain how he had come to that figure, but the judge said to him that he had to know the dates when the incidences happened. Then I interrupted the judge and said, ‘Just listen!’ He then said to me, ‘You keep quiet!’ So I said, ‘No, just give him a chance to explain. You asked him – now let him explain!’
“The judge then said he would have me removed from court, but after that, he didn’t give me any more shit. So he asked Ben again and Ben said that it had happened over a period of time and that it had been more than 20, but 20 would have been a safe estimate. He said he didn’t want to say it was 50 because that might have been too much. The judge then said, ‘You can’t do that.’ But when they questioned Rex, and they asked him if he disputed what Ben had said, Rex said, ‘No’. However, the judge then decided he’d take those 20 charges and make them into one. He did this with all the boys, made all their assaults just one. I felt this was ridiculous because Rex had not disputed the numbers. If the accused says, ‘I agree with you, there you go, tick, tick, tick, done,’ you don’t have to sit and play around with it any more.”
“What was the worst part of the case for you?” I asked.
Both the Archivist and his wife were at one with their answers: when the charges were read out in court.
Ben’s dad explained: “We weren’t prepared. The prosecution didn’t give us any indication of what was going to happen. We had assumed from what she had said and also what we understood from Ben, that she was going to say 20 or around 20 charges, just because there weren’t exact dates. But when she read out the charges, some of which involved Ben, we sat through 20 and then it went on to 30 and then 40 and 50 and eventually there were 144 counts of sexual assault to which Rex pleaded guilty and 57 of them were related to my son. Fifty-seven! And even then I thought to myself, well, if it’s 57, it’s probably more, because I know how he’d worked out the assault charges, which got condensed from 20 (definitely more) down to one.”
The Archivist gave his wife a weak smile.
“I don’t know why Rex pleaded guilty to so many. The judge initially looked as though he was siding with the defence, so when Rex pleaded guilty or acknowledged his actions for the 144 charges, I thought he was looking