Happily ever after

Another instalment in the highly unexciting Judge Motata drunk driving trial today – going on for two years now.
So, on what must be one of the coldest days in forever, Diva and I trudged the streets to get to the Joburg Magistrate’s Court. Too late – best seats in courtroom 35 were already nabbed by QuirkyOlderWoman, who now can manage to get her West Rand mullet cut (her description, not mine) into a ponytail with the help of numerous clips, and Fabulous Shoes in a pair of shiny patent black wedges.
As per usual, nobody was ready to start on time, so we all sat back and waited.

JoziJourno: Hey I heard this great radio ad this morning. All these guys singing “Kiss the farmer, kiss the boer” in the same style of the old “Kill the farmer, kill the boer” protest. Turns out there is this new programme coming out on Kyknet called ‘Boer Soek ‘n Vrou’.

Diva: You’re kidding me! That’s disgusting. All those Free State farmers wanting wives.

JJ: Diva, I am totally going to enter you for it. You would be brilliant. I can just see you on that show.

Diva: What? You think I would be good on TV. No man. I don’t want to marry some Afrikaans farmer.

JJ: Oh come on. Think of it. You would be fabulous on TV. Those farmers will go for you in a big way.

Diva: Hey if I did something like that, I would go all out. I am not actually Zulu, but I would get myself full-on wedding attire – beads, bangles, a hat, the whole thing hey. I would push their ratings through the roof.

JJ: Absolutely. You would be phenomenal.

Diva: Ja, but think about it. I am seTswana and my Afrikaans is really bad. But mind you, those farmers can often speak good seSotho and I can understand seSotho perfectly. So we would be able to communicate at least. But I can’t cook that well, I can make porridge but not koeksusters and hertzoggies and those dishes.

JJ: I think you need to be able to make a good potjie and bobotie and all that kind of boerekos.

Diva: Can you imagine me with an Afrikaans farmer with his enormous stomach, all these beautiful little coloured children running around?

JJ: Erm… ja. Awesome TV!

And then it was time for court to start. Hours of boring testimony.
The highlight: prosecutor going to great pains to remind the court that on the night of the crash the high court judge must have been drunk because he said “F… you” at least ten times over.
So we now wait for judgement...

Not-so high fashion

So I have been thinking.
Imagine Paris Hilton and Elton John were to produce a love child... Eeeeew. This is a disturbing image.
Ok, so let's confine this discussion to laboratories, petrie dishes and test tubes. If one were to merge genetic material from Paris and Elton, and create a fashion-crazy daughter, I am convinced that this little soul would have the exact same dress sense as my four-year-old daughter, Little One.
When we go out, I look at other little girls and wonder how their mom's managed to get them dressed in such co-ordinated ensembles. Since Little One turned three she has bee hellbent on dressing herself. And while I am no fashionista, I would say her style could best be described as Paris Hilton on crack.
We are talking bright, bold colours. Layers, patterns, stripes and dots - the more eccentric the mix, the better. Skirts over leggings, frills, socks with sandals, plastic jewellery ... get my drift? Such is her choice of attire, round the clock.
At bed time - I give you Bob the Builder pyjamas, Tinkerbell slippers and a plastic silver crown.
The accessories are bold and creative with an in-your-face twist of defiance. A stretchy alice band thingie worn low over the brow so as to give the thick-browed appearance of one with serious intellectual challenges; a fairy pillow case pinned round the neck and allowed to hang down her back like a super hero cape or brookies over trousers as inspired by one Superman.
I am a laid back mom and tend to let her do her own thing. So she does. Like everywhere we go.
Here you see her checking out kangaroos while we were holidaying in Australia. The fairy wings were totally not my idea...
She is going to be an interesing teenager!

A lethal sting

Working on Sunday is something I dread enormously before the time, and then feel an enormous sense of relief over when it's done. I know I can walk in on Monday morning with a skip in my step, feeling like I am secretly starting Tuesday while everyone else is hitting Monday blues. So my shift is now over, roll on my day off on Friday!!
So today's shift is over. A few hours were spent on one of those awful non-story events that takes a lot of running around and talking to people, on for it to unfold into something completely unexciting.
Then I followed up on the story I did the last time I worked a Sunday - the Dr Mike Sprenger murder. The bad news is that absolutely nothing has come of it. Detectives have no idea who ambushed him in his rooms, stabbed him and set his body on fire. Nor do they know why it was done. The good news is that somebody anxious to track the killer has posted a reward. So here's hoping it will eventually lead to justice being served and some kind of resolution and closure for poor Mrs Springer and her three small children.
Working on a DA press release turned out to be a whole lot more entertaining than I expected. The party has, since government announced its decision to disband the Scorpions, been really angry. They took every opportunity to oppose the move. Then last week we saw the final closure of our country's most elite crime combating unit. And the cops launched the replacement unit - The Hawks. The glitzy bash at Gallagher Estate was followed by days of colourful newspaper adverts heralding the arrival of our new birds of prey that will swoop down on criminals and tear them apart. By the end of the week the cops had chalked up three impressive arrests as Hawk successes. The first came on Tuesday when it was announced that they had arrested two guys who were planning on hitting a jewellery store in Durban. They also nailed the witch doctor who had been aiding them with muti, I think.
This delightful crowing about sudden big busts served as something of a sharp prod up the backside of the angry DA lion as the party lashed out scornfully. Dianne Kohler Barnard, their "Shadow Minister of Police" was incensed as she pointed out that only the head of the Hawks had been appointed, all other applications were still under review and so the unit now has only one member.
The cops, she maintained, are treating South Africans like 3-year-olds, expecting us to believe their fake claims. The launch, the fake success claims and the newspaper ads, she said, were nothing more than Hollywood treatment given to an issue, much in the same way as we have seen with the non-release of crime statistics, amounting to nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
The police maintained that technically they have not lied. Reporting structures mean that the big busts they gave out were those of units (organised crime) reporting ultimately to the head of the Hawks and so therefore they can be counted as Hawks arrests.
Dianne K-B raged: "Since when is the arrest of two would-be jewel thieves and a sangoma fallen under organised crime? It's hardly a multimillion Rand fraud scam, or a Fidentia scandal."
The Police Ministry kicked back against the DA's claims, describing them as nasty and unfair.
But Kohler Barnard's last crack was the one that had me in stitches.
"They've done away with the Scorpions and instead given us a featherless chick that eats mice and will likely never leave the nest."
Let us pray that she is wrong...

Surreal surprise

Sometimes the stories I come across are completely surreal!
Like this one from a place called Piet Retief filed by a small news agency.
It started off with a service delivery protest against the local town municipality. And as is the way with small protests, it got out of hand and two guys got accidentally killed.
So a funeral was held for them at the local stadium. This too went a bit pear-shaped when a young gent arrived in his bakkie and proceeded to spin wheelies. As one does at funerals of course. Then during his joy ride he lost control of his miniature lorry and it slammed into a 70-year-old woman and killed her. Her friend got her legs crushed.
People in the town were a little miffed when the case got thrown out due to lack of evidence when it went to court this week. Apparently they had smacked the young driver around and then handed him over to the cops instead of calling the cops out to the scene to gather evidence and eyewitness accounts. Big problem.
So the alleged joyriding killer walks free. Would it surprise you to hear that his name is ....
Surprise?
Yes.
Truly truly.
Surprise Mkhatshwa.
The somewhat volatile Piet Retief community members are now really annoyed with the police and the courts. They are threatening to "take serious steps against them".
I am glad I do not live there. Jozi is a veritable retirement village in comparison.

Career criminals? I think not.

I am thinking that Joburg must have some of the most creative and interesting criminals around. Our cops are most certainly not bored. It must be quite something drawing up the press releases they send out.
Take this latest breakthrough by the Edenvale cable theft unit: they spent a bunch of time trawling the suburb and came across a tall gent who had successfully wired his house to some electricity cables in the area and therefore set himself up with a serious supply of free electricity. Our men in blue arrested him and the courts told him not to do it again and that he should rather go to the municipality and pay for his power.
"The suspect was out on warning on the 9 June 2009 instant the suspect to stop illegal connection. He went further and connect. At this stage the suspect owes the council more than R40000.00," reads the Cable Theft Unit's new press statement on this matter. Ja, I also don't know what it means.
They continue: "The suspects connect in the street pole, our electricians spotted the wire which goes direct to the suspect and our members were warned and the owner of the house was arrested who is the suspect."
Basically the upshot is that this 46-year-old mechanic is now in custody and about to be charged with theft.
The second enterprising suspect is a woman who sent her husband a text message to let him know she was going to be working late so that he did not worry about her failure to return home at the normal time. But then, later that evening, the poor husband receives a follow-up SMS telling him his wife has been kidnapped and he mustn't call the police or try and look for her.
So, as would be the course of action taken by most thinking husbands, he immediately calls the cops and they launch a massive manhunt. The activate the tracker device in missing wife's car, locate it outside a flat and surround the place. Ten squad cars respond and they pounce on the place. Missing wife is found inside the flat, relaxing in her pyjamas, apparently intent on spending a quiet evening at home with her no-longer-secret lover.
The upshot: she is to be billed for the manhunt and will receive a formal warning not to pull such a stunt again.

First the body. Then the arms and legs. Now where's the head?

When I sit back at the end of a working day and think about how the past few hours were spent I realise that my life is bizarre. Blog fodder in fact!
Take today - my first call was to a woman at the Sunnyside police station to follow up on a strange report that came in over the weekend. Some hapless soul strolling through the bush near a small canal on Saturday afternoon came upon a suitcase. Somebody had set fire to it where it had been ditched on canal bank. He went to investigate and found the case contained a woman's torso.
Ah huh! There had been developments, the police woman told me. Yesterday afternoon a tramp had gone rummaging through the dustbins of Sunnyside. And that was when he came across two severed arms and a pair of legs. The cops were informed and detectives seem pretty convinced that the limbs matched with the burnt torso.
Early investigations revealed that there were no missing persons report on file for a woman in Sunnyside. And so emerged the first theory that the victim may have been a "lady of the night" whose disappearance was not yet known or a cause of enough concern to elicit a formal report.
The last big story we had about "ladies of the night" involved hotel rooms, Egyptian soccer players, a questionable theft report that then sparked a bit of an international scandal. But hey - let me not be the one to make random associations.
So I spoke to the investigating officer who confirmed that they have zero leads.
Then I received an e-mail from "The Ministry of Women, Children and Persons with Disabilities" (cannot say I love this lumping together of population groups into a such a lame-sounding category who then appoints a mighty man as their spokesperson - but anyway) who wants to place on record its "grave concern" (swear to God - I could not make that up) with "this gruesome murder and body mutilation".
They made a public appeal for information - both on the murder and the whereabouts of the missing head.
So that was the story. Post mortem tomorrow. I am glad I just get to write the basic story - some other poor soul has to do the actual autopsy. Eeeeew!

A tragic, tragic death

Today my heart broke for a woman called Elizabeth Ramolefe. I watched her cry inconsolably as she tried to make sense of her shattered world following the tragic shooting that left her grandson dead and the man who has employed her for the past five years locked up for murder.
It’s not often that stories rattle me to the core, but this one most certainly did as I watched the distraught woman battle for words to describe the terrible events that had unfolded so suddenly.
Yesterday the 12-year-old boy she has raised as her own returned home from boarding school. During the holidays he shares the small outside room she lives in on the property of a family in Parkmore. That afternoon intruders tried to break in – leaving everyone who lives in the large home feeling uneasy.
Last night she was cooking in the kitchen when the boy called her in her own language. She immediately thought the intruders had returned and alerted the man whose home she has kept in order for the past five years. He told her to stay inside while he called for armed response. The security company took a while and the child continued screaming for her. So the man grabbed a hunting rifle and fired a single shot at a shadow he saw move across the window of Lizzie’s room.
It was not long before it emerged that the boy was dead and the man was to spend the night in the cells as a murder charge was laid against him.
I got the sterile version of what went down from the cops. And then I went out to the house where it happened. I joined up with other journalists waiting outside, all of us kept at bay by a family who did not want to speak to us.
After a while Lizzie came to speak to us. She did her best to tell her story. She believed her boss had been trying to protect her precious grandson. It was all a terrible, terrible accident.
A small child’s swing and a jungle gym in the garden made it plain that little children lived in the house. Toddlers whose father is locked up in a police cell.
It’s a desperately sad situation. It seems like so many people have been so badly hurt by an senseless act. But perhaps not so senseless in the context of Joburg crime. How many families live in a state of fear after criminals have entered their homes or even hurt them? How many people, shaken badly by a break-in or attempted robbery, feel so scared and angry that they will shoot to kill if they sense their loved ones are in the remotest danger? Who in this city cannot identify with that mindset?
Later on a contact called. He had been on the scene. The hunting rifle, he said, had been a big one. No warning shot had been fired, he said. The child had actually been locked in the outside room when he was shot. That bullet that hit him was one perhaps intended for a large animal – and he had been a small child. The damage done, the source claimed, was immense.
The shooter had apparently been walking around afterwards, chatting and not acting like someone who had just killed a child.
The dilemma is a tough one. What does one write? How much information should get published, and how do you keep the story completely fair and objective? In what way does a single sentence paint a person’s character?
Who are any of us to judge?
Right or wrong, good or bad, true or false - the story must go out…