THOKOZA – A Thokoza man, who violently murdered the five-year-old child he fathered, following an incestuous relationship with his sister’s then 13-year-old daughter, was sentenced to two life-terms and an additional 25 years in prison, when he appeared in the Palm Ridge Regional High Court.
The boy’s battered and mutilated body was found dumped in a yard in Katlehong, in August 2013.
It had, by then – according to evidence led before Acting Judge Delize Smith – decomposed to such an extent that it took members of the Ramokonopi SAPS’s Child Protection Unit several months to finally identify the boy.
This could be done only after a painstaking facial reconstruction by the police’s forensic department, at the government mortuary in Germiston.
Details of the rape of the young teenage mother and the subsequent violent and brutal murder of the couple’s son, in August 2013, emerged during the trial in which the accused was described by the judge as being ‘evasive with the truth’.
According to evidence led during the trial, the young unmarried mother, who cannot be named, claimed she was only 13 years old when she was first sexually assaulted by her uncle.
She described in court how she was first raped by her uncle, who had lured her into his backyard shack under the pretext that she would be looking after his belongings while he was away for the night. However, according to her, later that evening she was awakened by her uncle’s knock on the door. She told the court that when she tried to leave the shack, he blocked her way and demanded that she undress.
She then described how the accused had smeared her private parts with petroleum jelly before forcing himself on her without her consent. From then on she was continually raped at gunpoint until she later fell pregnant.
After she fell pregnant her grandmother chased her away from the family home, but her uncle found a place for her to stay and later moved in with her and continued to rape her, until a child was born out of their incestuous relationship on January 2008.
Several months later, her uncle left her to stay with another woman in Zonkizizwe and, as she was unemployed, she was forced to take the child to live with its father and his new live-in lover.
The lover, who was charged with him for the murder of the child, later had the charges against her withdrawn and turned State witness.
During the trial she told the court that the child was constantly abused and assaulted by his father until the fateful day on August 2013, when the little boy was severely beaten by the accused for soiling himself.
She added that, after the child had died from the beatings, the accused forced her to neatly dress-up the corpse and then to strap the body on her back. The couple walked towards Katlehong with the dead body, before dumping it in a yard near the railway line.
The accused was arrested on July 10, 2014, after evading police for almost 13 months and he and the woman were both charged with the murder.
Sentencing the father to an effective two life-terms, plus 25 years for the rape of his niece and the murder of his own young child, Smith, described him as an ”unreliable witness”.
