MUST READ: Anti-substance abuse activist at Old Drill Hall Skate Park in Joburg CBD stabbed to death by a junkie
JOBURG – Anti-substance abuse activist pays the ultimate price with his life when he is stabbed by a junkie.
Children at the skate park.
An anti-substance abuse fighter has paid the ultimate price with his life after being fatally stabbed in the afternoon of 20 May in the Old Drill Hall Skate Park in Johannesburg CBD.
His only crime was a polite request to a drug addict, well-known to him and his colleagues, to choose a secluded spot in which to inject himself with his ‘favourite poison’ instead of injecting himself in front of the children who the activist was taking care of on the corner of Twist and Delvers streets.
Lucky Dlangalala points to the spot (the little yellow marks) where KB bled to death after being stabbed by a drug junkie.
Kabelo Refilwe Makwa, 31, better known to the young boys and girls and youthful and enthusiastic skaters and regular users of the facility as ‘KB’, had left his home that fateful day to do what he loved most – helping vulnerable children stay away from drugs and other forms of mischief.
According to Lucky Dlangalala, a colleague of KB, Makwa bled to death in front of the very children he so dearly loved. “We wish we could get some counselling for them,” said Dlangalala.
KB provided the children with an opportunity to fight boredom with an activity they loved the most – skating. Little did he know that on this fateful Saturday afternoon, his selflessness life would be cut short by none other than a user of the very substance he so desperately wanted to protect the children from.
Makwa, from eMalahleni in Mpumalanga who would have turned 32 on 23 May, founded the One-Love Skate Expo in 2010.
A professional skateboarder himself, KB had started the expo to help fight the rampant use of drugs, which he often referred to as a ‘scourge that was savagely consuming our youth’.
When KB noticed the junkie injecting himself in front of children, some as young as four, he quickly approached him and asked him to find a secluded place outside the skate park to shoot up.
“Not in front of the children, my brother,” Dlangalala reported KB as saying to the junkie who turned around and allegedly stabbed him in the shoulder, close to his neck, causing KB to bleed to death.
Some of the children at the Old Drill Hall Skate Park.
The junkie, who is well-known to KB and his colleagues, allegedly didn’t even try to run away but instead watched him as he bled to death and was later picked up by the police.
KB, who leaves behind his eight-year-old daughter, Zanokuhle, will be buried in eMalahleni on 27 May.
