Mom shields children with her body
2010-08-31 22:42
Jeanne-Marié Versluis, Beeld
Pretoria - The North Gauteng High Court on Tuesday heard how a Centurion woman lay over her young children to protect them while her husband wrestled with an armed robber on their bed.
Elana Maree, 27, was testifying in the murder trial of her husband Dawie's alleged killers.
The last words 27-year-old Dawie said to his wife were: "Pray for me."
Elana, whose children are now 3 and 4 years old, was crying when she left court on Tuesday.
Lawyer Marabe Talane and Rodney Katang Masemola pled not guilty to murder (two charges), house breaking and robbery with aggravating circumstances, and illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition.
Accomplice
The State is arguing that they robbed the Maree family and shot and killed Dawie as well as an accomplice, Seporo Martin Tshebesebe, on May 23 2008.
At the time the Marees lived in Meyers Park, Pretoria.
Elana testified that their children (respectively 2 years and 11 months old at the time) were sleeping in the couple's bedroom.
She and her husband woke up when a "person" who was standing on their bed, bent over to take her husband's firearm.
"My husband tackled him and they started wrestling. He was able to get his own firearm out of the guy's hand."
She saw a second person standing in the doorway.
She grabbed the children from their cots and lay over them on the floor.
The fight between her husband and the "first person" continued and shots were fired.
At one stage she saw the second man aiming a firearm "at where the fight was going on".
Then the bedroom door slammed shut.
Pray
Her husband called out to her to switch on the light. That's when she saw her husband was pinning a man down on the bed.
Dawie was injured. There was blood on the sheet and on his leg and mouth.
She didn't realise at the time that the man who was being pinned on the bed was also wounded.
She testified how she picked up the attacker’s firearm from the floor, aimed it at him and told him not to move.
"My husband asked me to phone the police and an ambulance and that I should pray for him."
Elana was in such a state of shock that she couldn't dial the police's 10111 number on her cellphone. Her husband was "struggling terribly to breathe".
Instead she phoned their neighbour, Braam Espach, and their friend, Marius Esterhuizen, while the children clung to her in tears.
She testified that the attacker on the bed "groaned a lot". He later died.
Espach rushed Dawie to the Wilgers hospital, with Elana following him.
"The doctor came in and, without him having to say anything, I knew Dawie didn't make it," she testified.