Natalie's Story

I saw the post about the two girls getting spiked in the upper highway area.

A month ago, (25th October) I went to Bootleggers in Hillcrest for a few drinks with mates. I wasn’t over drinking, I had about 4/5 spins. All of the sudden out of the blue I started crying, when I had absolutely nothing to cry about. I told my best friend to take me to the bathroom to calm down because I just wanted to hit people for no reason and was very aggressive.

When I got to the bathroom I wasn’t feeling good and it wasn’t that ‘drunk’ feeling. She then took me to the car to calm down, I had a few panic attacks which I never have, went to get a bottle of water from the garage and calmed down a bit. We had to go back to bootleggers because her boyfriend didn’t know we had left so we had to go back and tell him what had happened, when we went back she went inside for about five minutes.

Within those five minutes my other mates saw me sitting in the car and came to ask why I was in the car instead of jolling. I then said I didn’t know and went back inside and carried on jolling (I don’t remember any of this, this is what I got told). My friend then came to find me and told me to get back into the car, which I did. We went home and I felt fine. Before we went to bed I had an itch on my arm but I wasn’t at all concerned about it.

At 4am on the 26th of October I woke up with my skin being blood red from the hives all over my body, I was dripping with sweat so I told my friend I was going to shower, I blacked out in the shower and got woken up by her and her mom trying to help me. I got rushed to hospital and they couldn’t find anything in my system. I stayed in hospital for six days taking blood tests and being watched because of my intense mood swings.

Eventually they came back and found Rohypnol in my system (which explains the blackouts).

I have heard about so many girls getting spiked in that area between those three clubs/pubs that are there, and never thought it would happen to me. While I was in hospital, my family went in to Bootleggers asking to see camera footage, and they said sorry can’t help you and turned my family away. When I got out of hospital I went there and demanded to see some footage. At the time that my incident happened, the owner was shown on the camera, and had moved the camera away from where I was sitting around the time that everything occurred. Could be a coincidence but what are the chances.

This is my story and I hope something gets done about it! No girl deserves to go through something like this.

Thank you for taking note and reaching out to people. - Natalie, 2020 Hillcrest KZN