As the wind tears at the roof of the ramshackle room where 16-year-old Chulumanco Sodladla lived, a playing card, the jack of spades, flutters to the ground out of nowhere.
For the past three years, Chulumanco had been a leading light in the crime-riddled Walmer township.
He was the boy who was on stage at the Opera House, the boy who at his learning programme would silently slip the quiet children the right answer to a question to give them a chance.
A few weeks ago, he sent a girl a chilling message in reply to a simple short text in which she told him she missed him. “Stop this,” he replied. “You are going to get me killed.”
On January 5, Chulumanco was dead, murdered in his little room made of wood, roof sheeting and makeshift doors.
It was in that room that the brilliant scholar, dancer and actor was grabbed, and pushed against the wall.
It was there where his attackers, three boys of a similar age to him, pulled out a gun, shoved it into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
“When his father saw him he started shouting, ‘My boy, my boy’,” Chulumanco’s devastated mom, Vuyiswa, 40, said on Wednesday.
She was sitting in the same chair where she sat when her eldest son was killed.
To her right is a chair littered with typical teenage paraphernalia, pens and exam pads and jackets.
“I was sitting right here,” she said, her voice breaking.
The little turquoise house is creaking under the onslaught of the wind.
“I heard something like . . . you know when a two-litre bottle has too much gas? That sound it makes when it bursts? “That was what I heard. “They shot him in the mouth. I didn’t go and look.
“Later, we heard that the boys who killed him were at another house down the street first. Then they came to my foster son’s room.
“They first knocked there. “They asked for money or a cigarette.
“He saw they had a gun. They just asked for a cigarette.
“He said he didn’t have any money.
“We saw them but we thought they were friends with the boys.
“A few minutes later, they came back. There was a knock. I woke up.
“At first there was nothing happening. I just came to sit in the lounge. Then my son died.”
Chulumanco was a pupil at Khumbulani High School in Port Elizabeth.
“Chulumanco was very intelligent. He was doing drama.
“He went to church. He was a very active child. He was in the choir.
“He was playing soccer at Masifunde. He loved it very much.
“He was a good boy. He wanted to be an accountant. He loved maths.
“There was a girl that he loved but she was with another guy. He found out that he was a bad man.
“The girl wrote him a message saying, ‘I miss you’.
He replied: ‘You must stop this. You are going to get me killed,’” Sodladla said.
She believes that the man she mentioned was somehow involved in her son’s death.
The family’s front door is boarded up and one has to step over wire, walk around and pass a dog to get into the tiny house.
Young men walk past and into the yard of a shebeen with a big advertising board: “The brew for dreamers”.
Up the road is the church. An abandoned police station is less than a kilometre away. The weeds are window-height.
“When his friends heard that Chulu was killed they were crying so much,” his mentor at the Masifunde Centre’s Learn4Life project, Fundile Makhosi, said.
“He was a very humble person. One of the things I would remember him for is that he would give everyone a chance.
“Even though he knew the answer he would help the quiet children to say it,” he said.
“He was brilliant and talented, excelled at soccer and in the drama group. He was a very animated person.
“When I got the news I couldn’t sleep for two nights.
“We had to get counselling for the children in his group.”
He said he hoped Chulumanco’s legacy would be that his generation would change the community for the better.
Police spokesperson Colonel Priscilla Naidu said two suspects had appeared in court last week and there had been no new arrests.