Place of safety offered for rescued disabled Bay woman

Cheshire Homes in Cleary Estate have offered to take the mute, severely disabled 27-year-old woman, who was rescued from a Booysen Park shack over the weekend, into its safe care.

"We can give her a safe home. We will look after her well and make sure she gets better," Hillary Bolton from the facility said on Monday morning.

She said the abuse of adult disabled patients are sadly an untold horror story in the Nelson Mandela Bay metro.

"We took a severely abused and disabled man [recently]. He died after four days but we gave him a dignified death," she said.

The badly malnourished woman was removed from a dingy shack on Saturday by police, while, it is alleged, her inebriated mother lay passed out nearby.

The rats had been chewing on the hair and scalp of the skeletal young woman, who is unable to talk or walk.

It is also suspected that she had been raped repeatedly.

“When we found her she was eating dry rice out of the packet and trying to swallow it with water from a dirty bottle,” Anneliese Damons, who runs the Cinderella Project, which provides dresses and shoes to girls in the northern areas for their matric farewells, said.

“I was shocked to discover that she was already 27. She was so small – like a young girl.

“The door to that shack didn’t lock.

“Men were in and out of there.

“There is not a teaspoon or a cup in the house, just the dirty plastic bottle she was holding onto.

“Her teeth were so brown it looked like she had a mouth full of soil.

“It smelled like she was dead, but she was still alive.

“She was coughing a deep, sore cough like one who is dying.

“She can’t walk and she can’t speak.”

Residents in the area first became aware of the situation in November, when the landlord carried the paralysed woman out of the little shack and dumped her on the side of the road.

Blood and worms were oozing from her mouth, the residents claimed.

She looked like she was no older than 13.

At the time, her mother was allegedly out drinking.

The neighbours eventually carried the woman back to the shack at the back of the house.

For months thereafter, they saw men going in and out of the shack and heard her screaming, leading them to believe that she was being raped repeatedly.

Though they say they alerted police and medical officials to her plight, no-one came out to investigate or to help her.

Only Damons responded when they eventually turned to her in desperation.

After listening to their concerns, Damons went to the shack with some friends.

The woman is currently at the casualty unit in Livingstone Hospital where she had been washed and given clean clothes donated by members of the public.