By Zavela Makwabe
“His cruelty knows no boundaries” – this is what the judge said about 39-year-old Thobani Kesa before sentencing him for killing both his parents, his sister and his niece in July 2018.
Judge Mbulelo Jolwana condemned Kesa to spending four lifetimes in prison for wiping out “almost his entire family off the face of the earth” because of a dispute over R20,000.
The murders took place in July 2018 in Tienbank near Sterkspruit in the Eastern Cape.
According to the evidence, Kesa’s parents had asked both him and his brother to build a house in their homestead and payment for their labour was promised.
When construction started, a deposit was paid; but the rest of the money was withheld when the brothers failed to finish the work.
The siblings then demanded the remaining money and went as far as approaching the local magistrate’s small claims court demanding R20,000.
According to evidence, in the presence of the court clerk dealing with their claim, Kesa accused his mother of being a witch and dared her to pay him or face death.
As a result, his parents obtained a protection order against the two brothers, who then packed up, and went to stay in another village.
The elderly couple, their daughter and their grandchild were killed and burned during the night.
Kesa was arrested after he was found with bloody clothes by police who attended the scene and collected blood spatters on the floor of the burnt house.
The blood found on his clothes was then linked through DNA to the blood found on the scene, which belongs to his mother, an indication that the deceased may have been assaulted before being burnt to death.
Arguing in aggravation of sentence, Advocate Luvuyo Pomolo described Kesa as a cunning criminal who expressed no emotion about what happened to his family.
“It is not every day that one hears of a case, in which a person has wiped out almost his entire family from the face of the earth”, he added.
Judge Jolwana described Kesa as a dangerous criminal, whose cruelty knows no boundaries.
The court sentenced Kesa to five years for arson and declared him unfit to possess a firearm.
Picture above: A court gavel
Image source: Pexels
