It\u2019s so strange \u2014 all the memories are there. And it\u2019s not that I don\u2019t try and think about it, but going in such a linear manner, it becomes almost more clear when you talk about it this way. Because people tend to just isolate it and want to talk about one thing. But it helps to explain that these things build, and they build, and it takes years for things to go as wrong as it did in my house.<\/p>\n
The reason I wanted to go linear is because you have mentioned in other interviews how everyone focuses on what we\u2019re about to talk about. But that everything that came before was actually where the real trauma lay. We better talk about some fun things after this!<\/p>\n
We are going to. I didn\u2019t mean to start here. No, no, not at all. I was 15 years old. My mom and I had gone to see a movie, and my dad had taken the key to the front steel door. Every room in our house had a steel door. So if you got into the front door, the kitchen had a steel door that you had to unlock, because that\u2019s the kind of violence that we were living in. Our country was on the brink of civil war. So my mom couldn\u2019t get into the first lock. We always knew where my dad was. His brother lived a couple of streets away, and if he wasn\u2019t home, he was there drinking. Nothing out of the usual. We went over, they were pretty loaded, and I had to pee really badly. So I ran into the house to get to the toilet, and he took that as me being rude, because I didn\u2019t stop and say hello to everybody. Big thing in South Africa, the kind of respect that you have to have for elders. And he was in a state where he just spiraled. Like: \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you stop? Who do you think you are?\u201d<\/p>\n
We left, but you could just tell something was different. When we got home, I sat down with my mom and said: \u201cI think you\u2019re right. I think you should separate from him.\u201d I had never imagined that those words would come out of my mouth. Leaving that house, I knew something was just different. She knew it, too. I knew he was mad at me. So I said to her, \u201cWhen he eventually decides to come home, please tell him I\u2019m asleep.\u201d I went into my room, I turned my lights off, and I was scared. My window faced the driveway, and I could tell the level of anger, frustration or unhappiness by the way he drove in. The way that he drove into that property that night, I can\u2019t explain it to you. I just knew something bad was going to happen.<\/p>\n
To get to the point: He finally broke into the house. He shot through the steel doors to get in, making it very clear that he was going to kill us. His brother was with him as well. We knew it was serious, and so by the time he broke into the first gate, my mom ran to the safe to get her gun. She came into my bedroom. The two of us were holding the door with our bodies because there wasn\u2019t a lock on it. And he just stepped back and started shooting through the door. And this is the crazy thing: Not one bullet hit us. It\u2019s insane when you think about it that way. But the messaging was very clear. I\u2019m going to kill you tonight. You think I can\u2019t come into this door? Watch me. I\u2019m going to go to the safe. I\u2019m going to get the shotgun. Encouragement from the brother. He walked to the safe, and my mom pulled the door open while the brother was still standing there. The brother ran down the hallway, and she shot one bullet down the hallway that ricocheted seven times and shot him in the hand. It\u2019s stuff you can\u2019t explain. And then she followed my father, who was by then opening the safe to get more weapons out, and she shot him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s so strange \u2014 all the memories are there. And it\u2019s not that I don\u2019t try and think…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1591,81273,81272,81271,174,81274,158,9,11,10,10857,81270],"class_list":{"0":"post-205135","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-actors-and-actresses","9":"tag-alcohol-abuse","10":"tag-apex-movie","11":"tag-charlize","12":"tag-content-type-personal-profile","13":"tag-monster-movie","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-new-york","16":"tag-new-york-headlines","17":"tag-new-york-news","18":"tag-south-africa","19":"tag-theron"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}