Lifelike doll on front seat causes riot

A South African woman who makes lifelike dolls was ambushed by an angry mob and two policewomen after she left a doll on the front seat of her car to go shopping.

She said there is a need for such dolls: ‘some people buy them to deal with the mourning process after losing a baby.’

LookLocal juornalist Daleen Naude wrote from Middelburg that when Mrs Janine Patterson returned, the cops were all ready to clap her in handcuffs and were dragging her to a police van, accompanied by a mob of about 50 hysterical people. She said people were ‘rocking the car to see if the ‘baby’ was still alive, and they were preparing to break the car window. “The police refused to believe that the doll wasn’t a real baby.”

She suspects that someone had seen her put the ‘wrapped up baby’ on the front seat while she went to a cellphone business at the city centre. Two hours later, she returned to her car, where all hell had broken lose.
“There was no time to explain, everybody shouting and screaming, and the police women wanted to arrest her for ‘child abuse’.

She had to beg with the women to let her open her car so that they could inspect ‘the baby’ themselves.
“Only when I opened the car and grabbed the ‘baby’ by the arm and showed them the fabric the doll was made from, did they start believing me.’

She had some ‘panic moments’,  she admitted, but also at the same time it was a ‘compliment because people believed the doll was that lifelike. She makes these herself with materials from Germany.
The dolls are filled with a type of glasslike material which represents the exact weight of a real baby. It’s also painted in several layers of realistic paint and each layer is baked seperately: ‘creating the idea that the bnaby has veins beneath the skin’.

Each doll gets its own character and name, and it’s ‘birthweight certificate’. She can even place a little machine inside to duplicate a  human heart-beat. The doll also can make baby sounds. She says it helps parents who have lost a baby deal with their grief.