Bloemfontein | Tuesday
A WHITE South African man accused of killing a black employee by dragging him behind a pickup truck pleaded not guilty in the Bloemfontein High Court Monday, saying he could not remember the incident.
“When my wife visited me in prison the next morning, I told her: ‘They say I killed someone, who was it?”, Piet Odendaal said in his plea documents, read to the court in the central South African city by his advocate Terry Price.
Odendaal (45) who was then living in Sasolburg, about 350 kilometres north of Bloemfontein, said he took a number of sedatives, and drank brandy before meeting the victim, Mosoko Rampuru, at his office on August 25 last year.
Odendaal said he offered Rampuru a drink.
“I cannot remember what happened then. I awoke later and heard voices. It was the police.”
Price told the court his client was neither a racist nor a violent man.
Odendaal gave Rampuru a job although he had no vacancy for him, and had so much trust in him that he promoted Rampuru to storeman the day before the murder, he said.
Price said Odendaal had been taking Xynor, a sedative, since 1999 for stress. He had never mixed it with alcohol before.
Stefan van Deventer, a former pupil of the Sasolburg technical high school, told the court he came out of a school dance around 11 pm. He saw blood and pieces of flesh in the street, and decided to follow the pickup truck to see what it was dragging.
He later saw it standing in a field with its lights switched off, and decided to call the police. He returned to the scene to find the body, by which time the pickup truck had gone.
Rampuru’s right ankle was apparently tied to the pickup truck with a piece of wire. The state alleges that he was dragged through the streets of Sasolburg for several kilometres.
The case was initially heard in Sasolburg but was moved to the Bloemfontein High Court following violent protests by community members charging that the murder was racist. – AFP