A Shattered Window and a Shaken Mother: The Wild Aftermath of a Bottle Store Robbery

It was just after 3 PM, an ordinary afternoon in Protea Park, across from the Tosca Centre in Middelburg. Kholofelo Kgomoeshwana was watching television in her lounge, her toddler asleep in the next room. In a blink, the mundane shatteredliterally. Loud bangs echoed, flashes lit the periphery of her vision, and then glass exploded inward as a bullet pierced her window, striking her with fragments.

The source of the gunfire was a security tower at the Tosca Centre. The target was a fleeing suspect. The reason? The alleged theft of two bottles of Amarula.

From Security Tags to an AK-47

According to bottle store staff, a man was seen removing security tags from two bottles of the creamy liqueur and concealing them on his person. When he bolted, staff followed him to the parking lot, attempting to stop him from driving off. In a brief struggle, the suspect handed back the bottles, managed to start his vehiclea friend’s carand sped away, leaving the vehicle’s owner behind.

What happened next has left a community furious and a family traumatised. Shots rang out from the centre’s guard tower, aimed in the direction of Protea Street. Staff first told the Middelburg Observer that security had fired rubber bullets. The grim truth soon emerged: it was live ammunition, reportedly from an AK-47 rifle.

“I Grabbed My Child and Ran”

“I heard the loud bangs and saw flashes,” a visibly shaken Kgomoeshwana recounted. “Then the glass hit me.” Her first instinct was maternal terror. She sprinted to her sleeping toddler, snatched him up, and fled through the back door to safety. The bullet hole in her lounge window was a stark monument to how close tragedy had come.

The bottle store management visited her afterward, offering to repair the window. But the repair of shattered glass does little to mend shattered peace of mind. Kgomoeshwana waited nearly three hours for the police to arrive and take a statementa delay that speaks to a troubling normalization of such violence.

A Reckless Deterrent?

The store’s explanation added another layer of concern. They claimed the damage was caused by bullet ricochets from the road surface, asserting guards were aiming at the ground to deter the suspect, not at residences. This account has done little to placate angry neighbours.

“They said they were trying to scare him,” one resident told the Observer, questioning the logic of firing a high-powered rifle in a public area over two bottles of liquor. The suspect, meanwhile, got away.

The incident lays bare a cascade of failures: the escalation of petty theft into a potentially deadly shoot-out, the use of disproportionate and reckless force by private security, and the slow emergency response that leaves citizens feeling unprotected. For Kholofelo Kgomoeshwana, the memory won’t fade as easily as the fingerprint dust from her broken window. The flash and the bang are now a part of her home, a reminder that in her own lounge, safety was just as fragile as glass.