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Five life terms behind bars is what the Western Cape High Court handed a 26-year-old father of one for the rape of five girls.
One of Aviwe Hoya's victims ended up taking her own life because she could not cope with what had happened.
Judge Kate Savage also sentenced Hoya to five years for each of the five kidnapping charges against him for when he grabbed each of the girls who were between the ages of 10 and 16, two terms of eight years each and another of five years for the robbery of the victims.
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It emerged that he his robbery loot included a lunch box, R6.50 in lunch money and a cellphone.
He struck when the girls were between school and home, and most were in their school uniform.
"Through his criminal misconduct, he has shown himself to be a serial offender and a very serious danger to society," Savage said when she imposed the sentences on Thursday.
"Society requires that women and girls are able to walk safely in their communities, to attend school and to be protected from vicious attacks at the hands of deeply anti-social criminal offenders such as the accused," she added.
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One of the victims was so traumatised that she changed schools so that her journey to and from school was shorter.
Another became frightened of men and another drank poison and died last year after she wrote that she was "damaged a lot".
Western Cape police and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) welcomed the sentences.
NPA spokesperson Eric Ntabazalila said that his modus operandi was that he would run up to the victim, grab her around her neck, threaten her with a knife and demanded that they go to a secluded place where he would order them to strip naked and rape them.
The rapes took place in open fields, a nearby toilet and in a shack in Khayelitsha.
He raped some multiple times, and one was threatened with further violence if she told anybody.
Ntabazalila said that prosecutor Maria Marshall had argued that the man had shown no remorse for his crimes.
"The NPA welcomes the sentences as it is a sentence that fits and the crime and the criminal," said Ntabazalila.
"Now that Hoya has been removed from society, his sentencing serves as a warning to future perpetrators of these crimes that we are out to get them," Western Cape provincial police commissioner Khombinkosi Jula said in a statement.
He commended the investigators and prosecutors.
The girls were attacked so badly that medical examiners picked stones and grass off their bodies.
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