'I watched her drown'

CRASH: SISTER RECALLS HORROR OF BUS SINKING; BODIES BEING CARRIED

- Marizka Coetzer

He watched her sister drown that fateful day in 1985 when a school bus plunged into the Westdene Dam — and 40 years later it still feels like yesterday.

"This time of the year is very bad," says Annette Labuschagne, 58, then a first-year student at the then Randse Afrikaanse Universiteit. She had gone to her grandmother's house in Westdene and was waiting for her 16-year-old sister, Rita Botha, to come back from Hoërskool Vorentoe.

"I just arrived at her house and she asked me to go to the shop to buy milk and I remember saying that if I waited a little longer Rita would be back from school and then she could walk with me..."

Labuschagne said she remembers hearing a noise and running to the scullery window to get a glimpse of the dam... and saw something in the dam.