The evening before Rodney Bradley was shot dead, the three responsible trawled a neighbouring suburb looking for victims.
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Durban - The evening before Kloof resident Rodney Bradley was shot dead at his home, the three men responsible had trawled the neighbouring suburb of Pinetown looking for possible victims, but had been scared off by a high police and security presence.
“We decided to proceed to another area and we walked up the railway track to Kloof to avoid being detected by police or security companies,” Siyanda Majozi, aged 22, said in a guilty plea before Acting Judge Rod Callum in the Durban High Court on Tuesday.
Bradley, 55, was among the more than 150 residents of the city’s Outer West suburbs who have fallen prey to crime in recent months.
At least three homeowners were killed in three attacks, in which gangs of armed men held them up and assaulted them before fleeing with cash and jewellery. Last month, provincial police commissioner Mmamonnye Ngobeni deployed a 68-member “hand-picked” team of officers to the area.
Monica Bruun, of the Hillcrest Community Policing Forum, told East Coast Radio last week that crime had gone down in the Outer West, but police had acknowledged that there had been an increase in crime in Durban’s northern suburbs.
Former national police commissioner Bheki Cele, whose Umhlanga home was burgled recently, is scheduled to address the media on this issue on Wednesday.
After Bradley’s murder, one man, Nhlanhla Hlonwa, was arrested almost immediately. Bradley was shot after he opened his front door to let the dogs out early on April 5 at the Igwababa Road house he shared with his fiancée and business partner, Therese Carlson. Hlonwa remains in custody.
Majozi, who is from Amagatsha, near Hillcrest, was arrested two days later. He told of a third suspect, his cousin, whom he named as Njabulo Majozi. A warrant of arrest has been issued for this person.
On Tuesday, Majozi pleaded guilty to murdering Bradley and to robbing him and Carlson of computers, cellphones, cameras and jewellery.
Giving evidence in aggravation of sentence, Carlson sobbed as she recalled how she had locked eyes with one of the men, whom she saw from her bedroom window as he walked through the garden. She alerted Bradley, who was on the phone to a friend, and he armed himself with a stick while she locked herself in the bathroom.
Carlson said she heard shots and then people ransacking the bedroom. “They were saying ‘Where is the key, open the door’.”
They started banging on the door while Carlson was holding on to it. Preparing to be attacked, she put her rings in a rubbish bin and turned her cellphone on silent, hiding it in the laundry basket.
She stepped back with a bottle and then shots were fired through the door.
After a while all went quiet. She ventured out and found Bradley - a man she had known since school and with whom she had been living for 16 years - lying on the floor.
A trained nurse, she performed CPR on him. “I tried and tried until somebody told me stop. He was dead.”
Asked by prosecutor Rea Mina how she was coping, she said: “I have no life. He was so kind… he had time for everyone. Even the petrol attendant at the garage we go to came up and hugged me. They have taken his life.”
In his plea, read out by his lawyer, Vijay Sivakoomar, Majozi said that after giving up on committing crime in Pinetown, one of his accomplices had directed them to Bradley’s home.
“Njabulo instructed we were to wait nearby until he opened the windows and doors. We waited for about 20 minutes…and the three of us moved quickly towards the open door.
“I could see the deceased (Bradley) in the passage…he began screaming at us and rushed at us with a stick.”
Majozi said Nhlanhla fired two shots and Bradley then grabbed him. During a scuffle, the gun was kicked out of the door and the door was shut with him and his cousin outside. His cousin picked up the firearm and fired a number of shots at the door. Nhlanhla opened it and they went back inside, stepped over Bradley’s body, and began bagging valuables.
Majozi said that after his arrest, he had co-operated fully. He would assist in any further investigations and would testify against the others. He is to be sentenced next week.
On Monday, a man was arrested and charged with the murder of Waterfall father Jacques Oosthuizen, who was killed in a robbery last month.
Oosthuizen had a heart attack after he was shot and stabbed by intruders. The man is expected to appear in the Pinetown Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday.
The Mercury