Lamees Dilman’s father had an inkling to check the field one more time in search of his missing daughter.
On his way to the bus stop, David took a detour to the field which runs alongside Sherwood Road in Atlantis, Cape Town.
It was there that he discovered his daughter’s half naked body. She was dead.
It had been a week since 21-year-old Lamees had failed to return from her Atlantis home. According to EWN, she had gone outside to smoke a cigarette with someone. That was the last time her family saw her alive.
The community had banded together in search of “everyone’s darling”. The doors of all her friends’ homes were knocked upon, the field had also been checked before. However, she was found in the field in an incomplete shallow grave, where whoever took her life had fled.
Her face was so badly bruised, that her mother, Washiela Dilman, wouldn’t open the casket at her ‘farewell’, News24 expresses.
Of the spot where Lamees’ body was found, Manfred van Rooyen, a community leader expressed that the field had become somewhat notorious as a dumping ground for victims of murder.
“We are deeply concerned as members of the community about the ongoing murders in Atlantis,” the community leader expressed as per EWN.
The lack of light and the overgrown grass make it easy to hide “almost anything” in that field, Van Rooyen says.
The police are awaiting the postmortem report. However, a 35-year-old man, who is also a Sherwood Park resident, faced accusation of the murder, and went in for questioning on Monday. He was allegedly the last person Lamees was seen with, according to her mother, and the same person who’s home Lamees’s pants and other clothing items were discovered in.
However, he was released.
According to Joseph Swartbooi, Western Cape police spokesperson, this decision to release the suspect was based on the notion that circumstantial evidence could not link him to the case.
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