Kempton Park runner's daughter, 8, asks where her mother is

Elizabeth Moselakgomo’s eight-year-old daughter was the first person to notice that something was wrong. When her mother did not come back from a run, the child raised the alarm with the family, and she has been asking where her mother is ever since.

Moselakgomo’s body was found in Kempton Park. Her family identified her at the Germiston mortuary on Monday. The child is eight, old enough to know her mother should have walked through the door, and too young, her family says, to make sense of why she did not.

“It’s difficult for Elizabeth’s eight-year-old to come to terms with what’s happened, as she still keeps asking where her mother is,” her aunt, Vinah Moselakgomo, told eNCA.

The family is now facing two tasks at once. It is planning a funeral, and it is helping a little girl understand a loss that the adults around her are still absorbing themselves. Police are investigating the killing and no arrest has been announced.

What the child saw first

Grief counsellor Dr Bêne Otto says the fact that the child was the one who realised her mother was missing shapes how she may carry this. Children process trauma and grief differently, and it is hard to predict how any one child will respond, but the sequence here matters.

Otto told eNCA that the girl may return to that moment and wonder whether she should have noticed sooner or done something differently. The reassurance she needs is specific.

“Adults around her must reassure her that she did the right thing by asking for help and that nothing she did, or did not do, caused her mother’s death,” Otto said. “The responsibility lies entirely with the person or people who harmed her mother, never with her.”

That is the sentence the family will have to repeat, in different ways, for years. Otto’s point is that it is not a single conversation but a position the adults hold steady while a child tests it.

Grief in a house that is also angry

The Moselakgomo family is grieving in public. A fundraiser set up for the family has passed R84 000, and the killing has unsettled Kempton Park, where residents have been dealing with a run of deaths that police are investigating.

Otto says that combination, private grief and public anger, makes the work harder rather than easier. The family has to carry its loss alongside a demand for justice, and that demand comes with no immediate answer.

“The family may also have to navigate grief alongside public anger and a need for justice,” she said. “That anger is entirely understandable, but it can make grief more complex because there may be no immediate answers or resolution.”

For the eight-year-old, the practical needs are narrower. Otto puts safety, stability and connection first. She says the child should be told what happened in terms she can hold, without detail that frightens her, and she should be allowed to grieve in her own way.

Children do not mourn the way adults do. They may cry and then want to play ten minutes later. Otto says play, drawing, writing, talking about her mother, keeping photographs and taking part in rituals that matter to the family all help a child work through a death.

What to watch for

Otto says early contact with a psychologist gives a child and her caregivers a safe place to work and a way to track how she is doing over time. She lists the signs that should send a family to a professional: nightmares or memories that keep intruding, severe separation anxiety, a clear slide backwards in development, repeatedly acting out the frightening event in play without relief, avoiding anything connected to her mother, ongoing self-blame, marked withdrawal or aggression, frequent physical complaints with no medical cause, a sustained drop in how she is functioning at school or at home, or any statement about wanting to die or to be with her mother.

She also warns that the questions will change as the child grows. What is now a question about why this happened to her mother may later become a question about her own safety as a girl, and then as a woman.

“This may affect not only how she grieves her mother, but also how she experiences her own safety, freedom and identity as she grows,” Otto said. “We should not assume that she is thinking or feeling these things now, but they may need to be held sensitively over time.”

The investigation and the family

The South African Police Service is investigating the killing. Anyone with information can call the SAPS Crime Stop number, 08600 10111, or pass a tip to their nearest station, and the family has asked the public to route what they know through the police rather than through social media.

There is a funeral to arrange. The Moselakgomo family has not announced its date. Until the investigation produces an arrest, the child’s question will keep coming, and the answer the adults give her will have to hold.

Source: eNCA, ‘Where is Mom?’ Moselakgomo’s child faces heart-breaking reality