sunday times 4 february 2024

I am writing this piece to make other parents aware of how quickly things can change, and how easily a family can be devastated by tragedy. We never thought something like this could happen to us. We never thought we would have to ask the questions we now think every parent should ask before dropping off their child at a schoolmate’s house. You cannot drop off your children thinking other parents are the same as you — there are irresponsible monsters out there. South Africans cannot rely on the police and the courts to do the right thing.

January 5 2021 is the day it all changed for our family, friends and community. It was a normal working day. Just after 3pm, I was on the phone with one of my company’s biggest customers discussing the year ahead. I had been on the call for some time when I noticed my wife trying to call me a few times. I was nearly finished and planned to call her back in a

few minutes. However, my brother-in-law, who worked with me, came into my office and said I needed to phone Julie back urgently. He said something had happened to my son, Josh.

Josh, who was 16, had gone to a new school friend’s house for the afternoon. This boy had exotic pets Josh wanted to see. Josh loved animals and from the age of 12 had been a vegetarian. He was a loving, caring, sociable and well-liked boy. He played sport at school

and ice hockey at a local club. Josh has a twin sister and a younger sister who was 10 at the time. I grabbed my keys and ran out of my office thinking that Josh had maybe broken his leg or arm. When I arrived at the plot of land on which Josh’s friend’s house was built, I saw my wife, Julie, crying hysterically in the garden. I shouted: “Where is Josh? Has anyone called an ambulance?” I was taken to a room where I saw him lying on the floor at the end of a bed in a pool of blood. A small hand towel had been placed over his face. I checked for a pulse and started CPR. I noticed he had a wound on his right forearm. I was pleading with

him to wake up. He was cold, and his face was a pale grey colour. I realised there was nothing more I could do. Every single day, two-and-a-half years later, I still think about trying to resuscitate him. Josh had been killed by a shotgun fired at him at close range.

I ran out of the room and into the garden, where my wife was kneeling on the grass. I told her Josh was dead. There was a man sitting on the patio (the other boy ’s father). I asked him if anyone had phoned for an ambulance or the police. No-one had. Not long after that, a security vehicle, a paramedic response car and an ambulance arrived. The paramedic confirmed Josh was dead and said nothing more could be done for

him. My wife’s parents and my nephews arrived shortly after the ambulance. During this time, my daughter had been trying to call me, but I couldn’t answer her call. I couldn’t tell her that her twin brother was dead. I had a police captain’s number saved in my phone. I gave the phone to my father-in-law and asked him to call the police and get them to come to the plot. This was the first call I made to the police. After Josh had been shot, no-one had called an ambulance or the police. The police captain called back and explained that the plot on which the shooting had occurred was outside his station’s jurisdiction, but that he had passed on the information to the correct station.

We asked Julie’s parents to go back to our home and be with our daughters. After a while, a family friend arrived at the plot, but there was still no sign of the police. Three hours later, our friend told us to go home and be with our girls and said he would wait for

the police. On our way home, we passed my father-in-law, who was on his way back to the plot. When he returned to our home, he told us a police detective had arrived and said he believed we were in good hands, because the detective seemed to know what

he was doing. The paramedic, who had still been there, had pointed out the shotgun to my father-inlaw. It had been just underneath the bed. When I was in the room, I had not noticed any firearm. The police asked Josh’s friend where he got the shotgun from. He

told them he had taken it out of his father’s safe that morning.

This is when the lies started. The police asked the accused to take them to the safe, which was in an outbuilding. But the outbuilding’s door was locked, and the accused could not remember where the keys were. He said he had misplaced them in all the commotion.

The police cut open the door with an angle grinder, and inside that room was another door leading to another room, where the safe was. The forensic photographer noticed the door was covered in cobwebs and had not been opened for months. This is when the accused changed his version, saying he had taken the shotgun from the safe two months earlier. The police couldn’t open the safe, as no-one knew where the keys were. The police forensic photographer asked the accused, in the presence of his father, if he had washed his hands, as he needed to do a gunshot residue test. The father said he had told his son to swim, while the accused said he had taken a shower. Eventually Josh was taken away in a mortuary van,

after his grandad had given him one last kiss on the forehead. No-one was arrested.

Our first communication with the detective was when he told us we had to go to the state mortuary in Pretoria to formally identify Josh. The detective was supposed to meet us there, but never did. We were taken to a viewing room. Behind a window, they wheeled Josh in on a stretcher. It was real. It was Josh lying on the stretcher, and he was dead. I will never be

able to wipe that image from my mind. We were then asked to complete some paperwork,

and it was then we noticed that a murder docket had been opened. 

We saw from the paperwork what Josh ’s injuries were — he had been shot at point-blank

range in the chest with a 12-gauge shotgun. The pellets had first hit his right forearm, which was the wound I had seen. The official told us Josh had most likely seen what was coming and raised his forearm to try to shield himself. A few days later, Julie remembered that when she dropped Josh off there had been a third boy at the plot. Through friends, we managed to find out who the third boy was. This information was sent to the police detective handling the case (a Warrant Officer Ferreira). There were also a couple of other boys who had visited the plot who came forward with information they felt would assist the investigation.

This information was also given to the detective. There was radio silence from the detective. He wasn ’t taking our calls and never answered our messages. About two weeks after Josh was shot, he eventually arranged to see us and take statements from Julie and me, as well as the two other teenagers who had come forward.

The detective came the day after the arranged date. He sat with the two other boys and their parents and took statements from them, but not much of what they told him was added to the case file. The boys told the detective that when they had visited the accused, he had shown them the firearms — and one of them had even had a revolver pointed at him. This would show that the firearms were never kept in a safe.

Josh ’s twin sister received a photograph from a friend at school of the accused holding a shotgun to his chin and a revolver to his forehead. The photograph was dated March 2020. We showed the detective the photograph, but he wasn’t interested in it. When he was leaving, I asked him if he had been in contact with the third boy who had been there, as we had supplied the detective with his contact details and address. I asked him if he would go and interview the boy after leaving us. He looked at his watch and said it was too late. He

never went to interview the boy.

My wife and I were feeling broken and helpless. The police were failing us. Something had changed. Why was the detective, who had appeared to be on the ball after the shooting, now so uninterested? We decided to hire a private investigator. He interviewed and took statements from the third boy, his father and the two other teenagers. We were called to his offices and what he told us was explosive. The third boy was there when Josh was shot, and so was his father. In his statement, the boy said there were two shotguns. The accused first pointed the gun at him, but he ran out of the room. Seconds later, he heard the shot go off that

killed Josh. The father said the accused ran out of the room onto the patio carrying a shotgun and shouted: “I just killed someone!” He said the boy put the shotgun down somewhere on the patio. The father and the son had left before we arrived. They didn’t want to be involved. The accused, his father and mother never mentioned that anyone else had been there.

The private investigator and his colleague went to hand over the statements to the detective. When they arrived at the police station, the detective was with a higher-ranking officer. The detective seemed dismissive at first, but eventually took everything from the private investigator, who had recorded the meeting. A couple of days later, one of our neighbours came to our house after hearing the news of Josh’s passing.

We told him about how the detective had acted. He

said he would help us to get the case escalated to

senior police officials. He also put out a call to our

community and in no time we had a team of lawyers

and other professionals ready to help us. One Sunday evening, I received a call from a Brig

Letswalo from the police’s provincial office. He was sympathetic and said he was going to request that the case be investigated. On the Monday evening, he called to say he had the docket. The eyewitness statements the private investigator had taken had been excluded

from the docket. Brig Letswalo arranged a meeting between us and the police. Warrant Officer Ferreira did not show up. His captain was there, along with Brig Letswalo and another detective who would become the new investigating officer. The captain could not explain why the statements from the private investigator had not made it into the docket. He also could not explain why Warrant Officer Ferreira had not been to see the witnesses. He could not explain why a search of the property had not been done and why no-one had

been arrested. Brig Letswalo asked me to lay an official complaint against Warrant Officer Ferreira, which I did. Nearly two-and-a-half years later, this complaint has still not been resolved. A complaint about the police is supposed to be resolved within 14 days. Late in 2023, Ferreira was called to a disciplinary hearing, but he is still employed by the police.

The new detective took ages to arrange a search of the property. The search was important,

as one of the teenagers who visited the property said there were firearms all over the house that which weren’t locked in a safe. There was also the matter of the missing shotgun. Even though I had asked the new detective to get statements from the paramedic and other people that would have had an effect on the case, this was never done. In the meantime, our community team helped us find and appoint a watching brief attorney. Through our attorney, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) investigated the case. An advocate from the NPA came to see us. As a result of her interventions, the detective obtained some more information, and the accused and his father were charged with several offences, including

murder, illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition, and defeating the ends of justice. Their first court appearance was in October 2021 — 10 months after Josh was killed.

This was only the start of a very long trial. What came out in the trial was scary. The lies of the accused were unbelievable. After hearing the witnesses testify, it became clear the firearms were never kept in a safe, and that both the accused ’s mother and father knew their son had a shotgun in his bedroom cupboard. The accused’s father was acquitted on all his charges on a technicality owing to defective paperwork filed by the original detective.

How can this happen? How can a detective with more than 30 years of experience not be able to complete paperwork in the correct manner? Months after Josh’s death, the same detective was praised for doing an excellent job in another case. How was he able to complete the paperwork correctly in that case, but not for Josh’s murder? In October 2022, the accused was found guilty of culpable homicide and possession of an unlicensed firearm and ammunition. The case was then postponed for a social worker to do a pre-sentencing report. The state social worker had seen the accused before the trial began. In her sentencing report, she recommended he be sent to prison for his crimes. We were back in court in January, as the defence was not happy with her report and wanted to appoint a private social worker.

The private social worker interviewed us. We gave her additional information we had found out — namely, that the accused had been asked to leave two private schools because of behaviour problems. We asked her to contact these schools. The night before the next court appearance in March 2023, we received the private social worker’s report. It was a disgrace. She never bothered to contact the schools. In her report, she said the accused had showed remorse and that he was part of a loving family. During the trial, the accused had said he didn’t have much of a relationship with his parents, while his father had acknowledged he had been largely uninvolved in the upbringing of his son. Now in the report they are a loving, caring family unit? One of the possible sentences the private social worker suggested for the accused was house arrest, which would mean he would still be allowed to go to work. She suggested he serve the sentence at his sister ’s house in Durban. She arranged for the department of correctional services to visit the house to see if it was suitable for such a sentence, and they said it was. The prosecutor asked the correctional services

official if he had checked whether there were firearms in the house, and he said he had not asked. The same question was put to the private social worker, and she said she had asked the accused’s sister, who had said there were no firearms in the house. We now know the sister’s husband is the licensed owner of a 9mm pistol and a shotgun very similar to the one that killed Josh. On September 7 2023, the accused, now nearly 20 years old, was sentenced to correctional supervision — the mentioned “house arrest” it is more commonly known as. He will be allowed to leave the house from Monday to Friday between 6am and 6pm, and he will

be able to go to church on a Sunday between 9am and midday. Even though these times have been stipulated, we find it hard to believe anyone from correctional services will monitor him. He has to complete a measly 16 hours of community service a month. He is now living in a community that knows nothing about his history, and in a house possibly containing firearms. The magistrate was made aware of these firearms, but that didn’t change his sentence. How on earth is this allowed?

The Firearms Control Act is great on paper, but the police don’t act on it. The father of the accused has a string of criminal convictions. How did he even obtain firearm licences in the first place, and why were the requisite checks not done by the police? We want to start an educational awareness campaign targeted at schools. This would involve giving talks to pupils, teachers and parents on what to look out for and what a child should do if he or she

knows a friend has access to firearms. A company called Missing Link has generously offered to put the presentation together. If the talk saves just one innocent child from being injured or killed, it will have served its purpose.

Our Copperleaf Estate community have supported us all the way through this journey. There have been some other unexpected heroes. On a weekend away to Sun City, the general manager, Brett Hoppe, arranged a small memorial service for Josh in the Valley of the Waves, and unveiled a memorial plaque for him — the only one there. We have been going to Sun City as a family since Josh was a baby. We got married and spent nearly every birthday there. They didn’t know us personally, but Brett and his team showed us so much

compassion. Sun City never wanted or asked for any recognition for what they did, but I think they deserve it.

If you ever find yourself at the Valley of the Waves,

look for Josh’s plaque.