Pretoria - Mental health patient Jason Rabe is safe and back at Weskoppies Psychiatric Hospital after running away from the facility at the beginning of the lockdown.
He was found in one of the Covid-19 shelters in Durban, his father Francois Rabe said yesterday, adding that he had not seen him due to lockdown regulations.
“He arrived back in Pretoria in May and was placed in a high-security ward,” the father said.
Without a Trace Foundation - which assists in looking for missing people - managed to trace him and immediately contacted the father.
Rabe said the police were initially reluctant to fetch his son, but eventually took him back to the hospital.
“I have spoken with him over the phone; he doesn’t care about what happened he just carries on with his life as normal.
“He told me that the only thing he learnt from this is that he can now stop smoking because he spent such a long time without smoking since the lockdown.”
He said his son initially ran away because of the smoking ban, escaping through a window late at night.
He said Jason told him that he had taken a bus to Durban.
“We were in contact with the shelter every day to find out how he was. They told us he was becoming a little edgy and wanted to get out of there.”
This was not the first time Jason had run away, to be found in Durban, as he always had an obsession with that city.
His father said when he was 16 he did the same thing but was found a month later.
Rabe was emotional yesterday as he explained how the police sent him a video of his son on the day they fetched him, in which he was fighting them. It took about 15 minutes to get him into the car.
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Pretoria News