Hundreds of people walked silently through a Cape Town forest at sunset last night in memory of a 16-year-old jogger murdered there on Monday with flowers and messages of support being placed on the fence around the forest.
Florian and Shireen Blöchliger are “devastated” by the loss of their eldest daughter, who was killed in Tokai forest.
The unfortunate ordeal happened on Monday afternoon when Shireen and Franziska drove to Tokai. They arrived 30 minutes before a bus was due to drop off Franziska’s younger sister, Sofia, and the teenager decided to run a 5km circuit of the forest.
“After 30 minutes Franziska wasn’t back. My wife was getting anxious, the bus was coming and she didn’t want the little girl to stand at the bus, waiting, so she called me,” said Florian.
He drove to Tokai and after a search yielded no trace of their daughter they called the police.
“We are appealing to the community, to everyone around here, to help us to find this person who can do something horrible like that,” said Florian.
While the parents were searching for their daughter, Florian received a call from her cellphone.
“I shouted ‘Where are you?’ only to hear children’s noises in the background, like a screaming child, not my child, somebody else’s child. And after about 30 seconds the phone was put down.
“I got hysterical. I went back and told the police what happened. My father called me and said Fran-ziska’s phone also phoned him and the same thing happened to him as well.”
Twenty minutes after police arrived about 100 people came out to help with the search. Franziska’s body was found in fynbos at the edge of the forest.
The parents of Franziska Blöchliger are offering a R50 000 reward for information leading to the arrest of her killers.