'I comforted Baby Jordan'
2005-09-03 10:55
Cape Town - A teenager charged with the murder of baby Jordan Leigh Norton claimed he tried to comfort the distressed infant moments before she was stabbed in the neck, a Cape Town magistrate heard on Friday.
The macabre disclosure was made during a bail application by taxi driver and shebeen owner Sipho Mfazwe, one of five people arrested in connection with what the State claims was a contract killing.
The court heard that Mfazwe had detailed in a confession how he was hired by a white woman to recruit "people who do crime" to rob the Norton home and kill the six-month-old girl child.
Prosecutor John Ryneveld also said cellphone records showed Mfazwe made a number of calls to Dina Rodrigues, the person allegedly behind the scheme, the day before and immediately after the killing on June 15 this year.
He couldn't kill the baby
Mfazwe and Rodrigues have been charged along with Mongezi Bobotyane and Zanethemloa Gwada, who will also apply for bail, and a 16-year-old youth, who is not seeking bail because he was sentenced to five years jail on an unrelated robbery charge last week.
Rodrigues has already been released on R20 000 bail.
Ryneveld told the court that the teenager confessed to a magistrate after his arrest that he, Bobotyane and Gwada were at Mfazwe's shebeen when Mfazwe asked if they wanted money.
"He told us this white woman wants us to kill for her a baby and give us R10 000."
They went to the Norton's home in Scout Road, Lansdowne, one morning the following week, with phone books which Gwada was to pretend to deliver in order to gain entry to the house.
However the domestic worker said the family already had new books, and Mfazwe reported to the white woman by phone that they had been unsuccessful.
That afternoon they met the woman, who was driving a Corsa with a registration plate that began CA136, in the parking lot of a Steers at Killarney in Cape Town's northern suburbs, and she gave Mfazwe a cardboard box.
The next day they went back to the Norton home with the box, and this time he himself posed as a delivery man.
The youth said in the confession his three companions instructed him to "to remove the baby to another room and chop the baby".
"I did remove the baby to another room and the baby was crying," he said. "I tried to console the baby and I couldn't do what I was instructed to do."
Bobotyane came in and asked why he had not killed the infant. "I told him to do it himself," the youth said. "I left him there and never witnessed what happened."
In the taxi Bobotyane told them he had stabbed the baby. "He showed us the knife and it had blood," the youth said.
Later that day they went back to Killarney and met the white woman again who gave them R5 000.
They each took R1 100, put R300's worth of petrol in the taxi, and bought liquor with the remaining R300.
- SAPA