A Middelburg man accused of bludgeoning his five-year-old stepdaughter to death after quarrelling with her mother has denied killing the child.
”When we got back to the house, a young boy told us he had seen Asiba lying on a footpath next to the road,” John Brown (33), of Old Location, Middelburg, told the Grahamstown High Court on Wednesday.
”We immediately went there and I saw it was definitely her. She was dead. My wife was crying. I did not kill her,” he said.
Asiba Tshoba was killed in Old Location on June 9 or 10 last year. Medical evidence indicated that she died as a result of ”blunt force trauma to the head”.
Brown testified that he took his wife, Meitjie Tshoba, her young baby son and Asiba to a tavern on the morning of June 9.
”We spent the whole day in the tavern drinking and Meitjie and I were quite drunk. She [Meitjie] started kissing another man and I got angry with her, and we both left the tavern at 5pm.”
Brown said they began quarrelling as soon as they got home, and started hitting each other.
”Meitjie ran away to her aunt’s place and I kept the children with me. After I prepared supper for the children, we all went to sleep in the same bed, with the exception of Asiba, who was still finishing her supper.”
He said he then fell asleep without knowing whether the girl got into bed. He woke up when the baby started crying at about 2am, and noticed Asiba was not in her bed. The front door was open.
”I went outside with the baby and checked around the back of the house and in the toilet, but she was nowhere to be seen.”
He went to fetch his wife and together they went back to the house to search for the girl.
Brown said he told the police he had no idea how the girl had got out of the house, because the door had been locked.
Earlier, the court heard Brown was arrested at the scene after police officers entered his house and removed his bloodstained jacket.
DNA analysis has since linked him to the murder.
The trial continues. — Sapa