Marelie Wroe (43) just kept shooting – and it may have saved her and her family’s lives in a farm attack on Saturday night.
Wroe, a manager of the farm Landsberghoek in Percy Fyfe outside Mokopane, says an unknown number of people started shooting at the farmhouse around 19:30, where she, her son, Willem McDonald (25), and her cousin Eve Clulow ( 45) live.
She grabbed her firearm and shot back through a window.
“I just kept shooting and emptied one and a half magazines,” said a traumatized but brave Wroe.
She went to fetch her son in Pretoria on Saturday to stay with her and her cousin on the farm, precisely because farm attacks have increased in the last few weeks.
She says a friend of her son Derick Kruger (26) visited them for a while in the afternoon and she asked them to leave the farm gate open until he returned home.
“Otherwise we had to drive back and forth all the time to open and close the gate.”
She told the men at about 18:30 that it might be time for them to cut short their trip so that Kruger could drive home while it was still light.
Wroe says she was worried he might be attacked in the dark as they have been experiencing problems on the farm for the past two weeks.
At the farm gate, someone fired a shot at Kruger.
He sent a message to Willem and asked why he was shooting at him.
“Willem thought Derick was joking,” says Wroe.
They did not realize at that stage what was going on.
About an hour after Kruger left, Willem took a bath. He was barely in the bath when two shots were fired behind the house.
Wroe was sitting in her room with Clulow drinking coffee when the shots rang out.
She jumped up to fetch her firearm and Willem stormed out of the bathroom.
She shot through an open window in the direction of the attackers and heard one screaming and falling.
“I did not register how many shots came from the attackers’ side or how many I fired, but my cousin says she is sure she heard seven shots from the attackers.”
While Wroe was shooting at the attackers, Clulow called for help on the emergency radio.
Loggie van der Heever and other farmers in the area rushed to their aid and searched for the attackers.
No one has yet been arrested or detained in connection with the attack.
