When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I'm feeling sad...

Five weeks ago today exactly I was in Austria as one of the journalists invited on the BMW EuroStyle 2009 tour. At about this time I was standing in one of the theatres in the Salzburg Festival grounds. We had eaten a splendid lunch of Wiener schnitzel and had visited the flat in which Mozart's widow had lived. A music professor had handed out whistles, triangles, wooden clackers, drums and an assortment of noise-generating implements and had, as he sat before a piano, had played conductor and guided us along in an unexpectedly charming mini symphony. It was glorious!
And so it was that, five Friday afternoons ago, I came to be standing in the arena where they filmed the end scenes of The Sound of Music - one of my all-time favourite movies when I was a kid. Right then an SMS message came through from home. "Are you going out to the family murder scene in Orange Farm?"

At that very moment it hit me how far away I was from my ordinary life in every sense possible. No, I was not rushing off to some blood-stained crime scene in Jozi. I was absorbing the delights of a different existence. As we walked on to join some of the festival staff in a room overlooking the Salzburg scene as we drank Champagne and ate Mozart chocolates I felt a sense of joy bubbling inside me.
Today was back to real life. I spent the morning at the Newlands Regional Court where a man was supposed to be sentenced for shooting a four-year-old child in the head. It was one of those unintentional accidents. His own son had been mugged and had his cellphone stolen, so he had gone running after the muggers. He fired at them, the bullet ricocheted into a creche and struck another man's son and killed him.
It seems not even four-year-olds at play school are safe in Joburg.
It chills my heart and makes me long to be where the hills are alive...

A violent bloody day

A dead child, a shootout in a busy intersection, shattered victims, injured suspects - it all happened today and landed in my shift. This shift turned into one of those nightmare days that had me thinking that while it could make for a pretty good, if somewhat unbelievable fiction story.
Soon after arriving at the office I picked up a strange e-mail from paramedics about a call they'd responded to in Craighall Park where they entered a flat and found a man lying on his bed with a knife in his chest. His four-year-old daughter was found dead beside him.
So off I headed with ChiefPhotographer to the place where it all happened. We spoke to various people and pieced together the scenario: the dad was a friendly guy who often made food which he sold to people in the area and was often seen with his little girl. Last night the mom arrived home and found everything locked, the curtains all closed and nobody answering her calls. She found a groundsman who helped her climb a ladder and break a window to get in and found her child throttled and her husband lying with a knife in his chest.
This morning he was placed under police guard - seems he strangled the child and then attempted suicide. So he's probably going to go down for murder. If his life was bad before, it's about to get worse.
Before we were finished we got another call - a shooting at the intersection of Jan Smuts and Republic in Randburg. So off we went.
Crime scenes in the sun with no shop nearby have to rate as one of my least favourite places to be on a hot day. I get sunburnt, my face goes red and the smell of baking blood makes me gag after a bit. To top it all, our early arrival upset one stroppy little cop who screamed at us as we stood behind his cordons, pointing his finger at us and accusing us of destroying evidence. Truly an annoying character who did not even have a proper gun holster and kept pulling out his handgun and then sticking it back into the side of his pants. He did not look menacing or cool. He did look like an idiot.
Three armed robbers had hit a small business in the area and then caught a taxi. Their victims however, who they'd left tied up, managed to escape and followed them, and set the Metro cops on their tail. As they bounced off in their taxi they realised the cops were onto them and started shooting. The cop got hit in the stomach and fired back, hitting one of the suspects in the leg as the green taxi hit a wall and stopped. The two unhurt guys hightailed it off.
Spectators gathered at the scene and detectives would come and go. There were lights and sirens going. It was chaotic.
And so we waited for the official cop spokeswoman to arrive and give us the official line. During that time the cops managed to catch one of the fugitives and brought him back to where we were, lying him on the ground next to his injured buddy who had fallen asleep on a pillow, arms cuffed behind him with a drip feeding him from where it was hung inside the crashed taxi.
Suspect number two was badly damaged. He was bleeding from the head and hardly conscious. I thought he had been shot and checked this with the cop.
The response: "Um, no. He was running away from us and he fell."
Ja right!

US facilities closed, crime statistics released!

The day started slowly. So slowly, in fact, that we actually called the local news wire service to check that their system was in fact working as not one story, press release, weather report or anything had dropped overnight.
And then it started....
First alert: every United States government facility in this entire country was closed. So I jumped on it, got hold of the press attache and confirmed that yes, indeed, every single consulate, the embassy, mission, US library etc in South Africa was closed. Why??? Because of "information" received by "our regional security office". Groovy story, but above and beyond challenging to pin down.
CutePhotographer rushed out to get a picture of the consulate in Sandton, and nearly got arrested. I phoned numerous mechanical switchboards answered by recordings with American accents. I tried the police, the Ministry of State Security and the National Intelligence Agency. No comment from anyone. I phoned the Association of South African Travel Agents to find out what was happening to the doomed souls whose visa interviews happened to be scheduled for this here day of closure - and they had no information. These appointments are between the traveller and the consulate with no middle man other than a pin number you have to buy from Pick 'n Pay for - get this - US$10 just to contact them for a time to go in and pay a whole lot more for the visa you need to enter the land of the free should you be the holder of one of our green passports.
So ja - smoke and mirrors, bashed something together and got the story into the evening paper. I got an call from someone from the State Security Ministry whe felt sorry for me and said that, in light of the fact that not even Foreign Affairs would say anything, the ministry might just change their mind and call me with a comment. I wait in anxious anticipation....
And then after that the cops released the latest crime stats. They are baaaaad. Really shocking. We are still sitting on 50 murders a day. And house robberies - those hideous stories of gangs who break into homes, tie everyone up and terrify the kids senseless - are up by a whopping 20%.
Ah yes - we South Africans are not likely to sleep peacefully.
Let's see what surprises the stats hold next year after the police minister's enthusiastic encouraging of a shoot-to-kill policy for our men and women in blue.

Dawn deaths and devil worship

At dawn this morning I found myself alongside CutePhotographer standing near two dead bodies splayed across the backyards of two units in an upmarket estate in Bloubosrand. Yet another tribute to our Safety and Security Minister's shoot to kill fever that seems to have gripped our cops.
It's a weird experience to stand next to yet another dead body and see people from the complex driving past and cheering or expressing some kind of joyful reaction at seeing the end result of the mega shootout that ripped through their home territory during the early hours.
A guy from the body corporate came sauntering through with his little girl as forensic investigators busied themselves on the scene taking fingerprints off the corpses and whatever else they do with dead guys.
"Poppet, don't go there," he chided as his off-spring toddled off into cordoned-off territory. She wandered back and to hide behind daddy's legs as a friendly detective gave her a strip of plastic crime-scene cordon to play with. She waved it happily like a flag.
A woman came outside in her pyjamas to take pictures of the crime-scene action outside her house, commented that the shootout had caused the complex to sound like Beirut overnight and she wanted to send proof to her relatives abroad. She wants to move to Australia.
A pretty young woman stopped as she tried to drive past. She started laughing when she saw the bodies, clamped her hand over her mouth in shock and quickly apologised for giggling because people had died. But their deaths made her feel safe, even though she had sold her home and would be moving out soon anyway.
It was a bizarre morning and quite something to realise how angry and crime-rattled Jozi people are. And how fed-up they are with the armed robberies and hits plaguing the suburbs.
But no time to waste - I had to move on to the Joburg High Court for the continuing pre-sentencing hearing of the schoolboy convicted of killing another boy with a ninja-sword and hacking three other people.
Today it was the turn of South Africa's Satanism expert Dr Kobus Jonker to testify about the boy's possible involvement in the dark world of devil worshippers.
Nope - it seems the kid had just been dabbling in the occult and got his satanism backwards, picked up junk off the internet and mixed it up with pagan practices.
"Donker Jonker" - as he was known when he headed the cop's Occult Related Crimes Unit before it got shut down after human rights activists pointed out that our Constitution guarantees freedom of religion - pointed out that young Morne Harmse failed the grade when it came to ... well ... good Satanic practices.
Commenting on photos of the teenager's bedroom he pointed out that there was no altar to speak of, and the blood smears on the walls that are generally evident when one makes pacts with the devil were sadly lacking. His posters were more in line with eastern religions than demonic and the home made ouija board hidden under his bed was marked with pink and white wax, which showed his ignorance as true Satanists use only black and red candles apparently - with the black summoning up the forces of darkness and the red calling on the energies of blood. Even the witch script on his diary was unrecognisable.
So ja - it seems that poor Morne failed even in his efforts to be a really evil boy.

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…

Murder, madness, sadness and Father's Day

Sometimes the hideousness of Joburg’s “murder capital of the world” status literally makes people go crazy.
Today I watched a man, who must obviously have been a patient of Dr Mike Sprenger, say a prayer at the gate of the medical rooms in Rosettenville. It was here that the much-loved general practitioner was stabbed to death and had his practice set on fire on Thursday night. He then walked silently to his car and began hammering on the steering wheel and screaming. His anguished wails sounded more like those of a tortured animal than a human being.
It has been two days since Dr Michael Sprenger’s charred corpse was discovered in the fire sweeping his medical practice.
For a while today I stood at the gates of the medical practice where he has treated families in the area for the past 30 years. Between the plastic crime-scene cordons across the gate people had fastened bouquets and messages. The area remained locked off. No arrests have been made, and not even detectives seem to know why people would break in and murder a man who had apparently been sorting out medicines he dispensed to his patients.
It’s sad and insane and makes no sense. And that’s just to me, the journalist telling the story.
I have watched the murdered man’s patients cry, sob as they tried to describe him, pray and go mad.
I cannot imagine the pain suffered by the doctor’s wife, who is now a widow. Nor by his two sons and his little girl who will turn seven in two weeks. I understand that they had their own private memorial service at home today. And it’s Father’s Day!