Durban - Worried that his common-law wife had not answered her cellphone for two days - his only means of communicating with her and his six children - Leonard Babore decided to leave work and return home.
“I will never forget it,” he told the Daily News on Thursday as he described what he saw when he opened the door to his Inanda home.
A putrid smell hit him. In the dining room was his wife, Nobuhle Leneha, face down in a pool of blood.
Near her body lay a baby’s empty bottle.
Babore walked down the passage and into their bathroom to find the bodies of his five children stacked one on top of the other, all covered in blood.
Later he found out they had been stabbed 78 times.
In the main bedroom, Babore found his youngest child, 15-month-old Mpho. He was alive. His legs were tied with a piece of cloth. He had not eaten and his nappy had not been changed.
Almost four years later, while listening to evidence in court, Babore heard for the first time that he had been due to become a dad again. His wife was 11 weeks pregnant when her relative, 25-year-old Tsepang Solomon Mokhali, murdered her and stabbed to death his nieces and nephews.
He did it for R11 000 and a cellphone.
Durban High Court Judge Jacqui Hendriques convicted Mokhali on Thursday for the six murders as well as for robbery with aggravating circumstances.
Babore sat in court with two friends. On the opposite side sat Mokhali’s mother and sister.
Leneha’s family have not seen Mpho, now four, since the murders. Babore said Mpho would start school next year.
He does not ask about his mother, said Babore, because “he is too young to know that he doesn’t have a mother”.
“He doesn’t remember her or his siblings. He lives with me in Clare Estate. My sister helps to look after him while I’m at work,” he said.
They have not returned to their home in Inanda.
Babore said he paid someone to look after the place and he “just goes there” to check on things once in a while.
“I felt so much pain when I saw my children’s bodies stacked one on top of the other. So much pain to the extent that I didn’t know what to do. I was even suicidal.”
He had last seen his wife and children alive on Christmas Day in 2012.
He left them because he had to return to Clare Estate where he ran a tuckshop. They all lived together in Clare Estate, but during the school holidays Leneha and the children would stay at the family home in Inanda.
He employed Mokhali, from Lesotho, to clean the house and garden, feed the dogs and chickens, and do occasional cooking.
The motive for the murders was greed. Mokhali had seen Leneha counting money in her room. While cleaning the house, he found a gun and decided he would use it to steal the money from his sister.
After shooting Leneha, he stabbed her. The five children came running to see what happened and started crying. He pushed them into the bathroom and tried to shoot them, but there were no bullets left in the gun. So, he went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife.
Babore’s eldest child, 12-year-old Fatima, was stabbed 19 times on her head, neck, chest and back. She was in Grade 6 and wanted to become a teacher, said Babore. “She was a bright child and liked to help me at the shop after school.”
Tumele, his 10-year-old son, was stabbed 43 times. “He was a good boy, very clever. He told me he wanted to be a doctor.”
Six-year-old Karabo was stabbed six times, four-year-old Simphiwe was stabbed five times and three-year-old Agnes, five times.
Agnes “drowned in her own blood”. This was the finding of the forensic pathologist, Dr Threnesan Naidoo, who conducted the post-mortems at that time.
He said she had 300ml of blood clots in her chest cavity. Her trachea pipe was also damaged, compromising her lungs.
Only Tumele had defensive injuries, showing that he tried to fight his attacker.
Senior State advocate Kelvin Singh told the court the children literally had to watch as their siblings were being “butchered and slaughtered”.
From the order they were found in, it appeared that Tumele and Fatima died trying to protect their siblings.
Picking up the pieces of his life has not been easy, said Babore.
Listening to the judgment and the details of what happened has left him feeling hurt and extremely sad.
He had been in a relationship with Leneha for 14 years and said they were a very happy family.
He hoped for a heavy prison sentence for Mokhali, a man he entrusted to look after his family but who ended up killing them. The sentencing is expected next month.
Daily News