A video clip of a smiling Joshlin Smith, who was six years old when she missed in South Africa more than a year ago, had most people sob in the courtroom.
It was shown during a hearing in Saldanha Bay, near Cape Town, prior to the conviction of Joshlin's mother – a drug addict who is assumed to have sold her for money.
Racquel Smith, also known as Kelly Smith, was convicted of killing and trading her daughter earlier this month. The 35-year-old mother of three was found guilty, together with her friend Jacquen Appollis and their friend Steveno van Rhyn.
Even the interpreter of the court could not stop her tears while translating the victim impact statements in English.
A judicial officer first reads those statements in African, the language spoken by those in the impoverished Middelpos Informal Settlement or Baldanha Bay, where Joshlin had lived.
In their own words, Joshlin's grandmother, the family friend who wanted to adopt Joshlin and her teacher about their pain and bewilderment about how she could have been sold by her mother.
A witness during the process had claimed that this was a traditional healer, known in South Africa as a “sangoma”, who Joshlin wanted for “her eyes and skin”.
A local pastor also testified that he had once heard Smith talk about selling her children for 20,000 edge ($ 1,100; £ 850) each, but would be willing to accept a lower figure of $ 275.
“How do you sleep [and] Live with yourself? 'A destroyed Amanda Smith-Daniels, who takes care of her other two grandchildren, asked her daughter in her victim statement on Wednesday.
Smith and her co-accused refused to take the position during the six-week process and was held in March in a community center in Saldanha to enable the broader community to attend proceedings.
But as Joshlin's mother heard the statements on Wednesday and saw the video clip, she sobbed uncontrollably.
The teacher of Joshlin, Edna March, described the little girl as a quiet student who was “very neat”.
She said she was struggling with daily questions from Joshlin's schoolmates about her place of residence.
Determined to remember her, she said the class was listening to her favorite gospel song God will work it out at the start of every school day. It was also played in tears in the courtroom on Wednesday.
To this day, nobody knows what happened to Joshlin.
Joshlin Smith's mother and her co-fancied person refused to testify [EPA]
Her disappearance on February 19, 2024 caused shock waves throughout the country. Bianca van Aswegen, a criminologist and national coordinator at Missing Children South Africa, compared it with the case of Madeleine McCann, a British girl who was missing in Portugal in Portugal.
Madeleine was three years old when she disappeared from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in the Algarve – and Hare is one of the most controversial, unsolved missing personal cases in the world.
Mrs. Van Aswegen said the BBC that although the conviction of the trio in Joshlin's case had given people a sense of relief, “the issue is that nobody knows where Joshlin is and I think that's the big question that South Africa is still asking”.
A photo of Joshlin's troubled life arose during the process – and a better feeling of her personality during the hearings of this week prior to the conviction.
She was born in October 2017, from Smith and her former partner Jose Emke, who broke on Wednesday and had to be carried out from the courtroom.
Their second child – she and her older brother, now 11, both suffered from neglect, according to a social worker who testified during the process.
Growing up, Kelly Smith had lived with her grandmother from mother's side and had been struggling with resource abuse since she was 15 hours – often offensive to her and her children when she was high, social workers said.
A report prepared by a social worker for the hearing paints a grim image of Smith's drug addiction at the time of the birth of Joshlin.
Her grandmother had kicked Smith from the parental home because of her drug use and at that time she had threatened to put down her own son.
The judge noted that the Smith took five months to register the birth of Joshlin – according to the law this must be done within 30 days – and had lived at a hiding place for abused women.
When she later went to Rehab, family friend Natasha Andrews stepped in to take care of Joshlin – and she and her husband wanted to adopt her.
“We could have foreseen her better than her mother,” said Mrs. Andrews during the trial, but the plans fell apart in 2018 because the parents “did not agree.
Nevertheless, Joshlin often visited the Andrews family for weekends and school holidays and would travel them.
The clip that was shown in court of Joshlin on Wednesday was from one of those holidays and was part of Mrs Andrews's victim statement.
She shared this and other photos of Joshlin who played with her own daughter because “so many people … don't know what Joshlin sounds,” she said.
It was this and her description of the pain of her family that led the greatest output of emotion in the courtroom.
Joshlin grew up in a corrugated sheet structure in Middelpos Informal Settlement with her mother, her mother's partner, her brother and younger half -sister.
The report of the social workers described the cabin as the offering “little in the way of privacy because of the very limiting living space”.
This is the hut where Joshlin and her family lived [Mohammed Allie / BBC]
Smith did strange jobs to maintain her family, including part -time household work for Kelly Zeegers, who lived with her family in a nearby neighborhood and paid her with groceries instead of cash.
“This is to ensure that she and the children have a plate of food,” Zeegers said during her testimony.
Some witnesses described Smith as a good mother; Her sister told Joshlin's court was her mother's spitting when she was young.
The few that is known about what happened to Joshlin on the day she disappeared is thanks to Laurentia Lombaard, who has become the witness of the state. At the time, she was at the hut that smoked drugs with Appollis and Van Rhyn.
She explained that Joshlin, who had started a few weeks before her disappearance, had stayed at home that day because they had no clean uniforms.
The children were mainly left in the care of Appollis, because Smith was in and out during the day and occasionally return to smoke.
It is not clear how or when Joshlin was missing, but the trial determined that it was some time in the afternoon – but the care of most adults meant that the disappearance was only reported to the police at 21:00.
The social worker was appointed to compile the report on the trio prior to their conviction, Smith described as “manipulative” and someone who told “lies with bare faces”.
“That is why it is not a piece to conclude that Smith is the brain behind the human trafficking of her own daughter,” he said.
A community center has played host for the Supreme Court [Gallo Images via Getty Images]
Mrs. Van Aswegen said she hoped that the trio would get “a good punishment” that reflected a growing crisis in child trafficking.
“It is much more a crisis than police statistics actually show us because of the fact that many cases are not reported,” she told the BBC.
She said what was unusual in the Joshlin case was that it had caught the entire nation.
'I have never really seen a business in South Africa [and] We have also not seen such a big search for a missing child. I think social media have played a major role [and] We had involved political parties in the case. “
According to the South African news site Iol, 632 children were missing last year and 8,743 in the last 10 years.
Earlier this month, police spokesman Athlenda Mathe said that many children were eventually reunited with their families.
Mrs Van Aswegen said that this showed that people could never give up hope and the search for Joshlin would continue.
This hope was most reflected by the Andrews family during the hearing.
A poem written by Mrs Andrews Tayla's 14-year-old daughter was also read before the court. It described her pain not to know what had happened to Joshlin and her hope that she was safe.
“We just want to hug you again,” said Mrs. Andrews in her statement. “You are our flower, our baby and our child with green eyes.”
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[Getty Images/BBC]
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