I Don’t Want to Die: The True Story of Abandonment, Trauma, Addiction, and Surviving the Sizzlers Massacre

Quinton Taylor’s life began with abandonment, neglect, and rejection. Removed from his parents as a child, raised through foster placements and children’s homes, and pulled through cycles of trauma, abuse, addiction, and survival, he grew up carrying wounds that could easily have destroyed him.

Then came the night that changed everything.

On 31 December 2002, Quinton became the sole survivor of the Sizzlers massacre in Sea Point, Cape Town — a brutal attack that left multiple men dead and nearly took his life. Staggering into a petrol station covered in blood, he repeated the words that would define the turning point of his story: I don’t want to die.

This is a raw and deeply personal memoir of pain, endurance, destruction, and redemption. It is the story of a man who walked through abandonment, violence, sexual trauma, homelessness, crime, drugs, and despair — and lived to tell the truth.

Honest, unfiltered, and ultimately hope-filled, I Don’t Want to Die is a testimony to survival, identity, and the grace of God that can reach into even the darkest places.