Something drove a sergeant to draw his firearm and allegedly shoot 45-year-old Jeanette Odendaal. What that something is is now the focus of an Independent Complaints Directorate investigation, as detectives from the police watchdog body yesterday continued with their attempts to make sense of the bizarre crime.
Preliminary reports suggest that Odendaal died at about 8.30pm on Tuesday after a bullet hit her in the left shoulder and exited through her chest. Just moments earlier, her white VW Citi Golf had driven into the back of a police patrol van on Monument Road just outside the Kempton Park police station.
Police said the sergeant was in the charge office of the police station when a car guard ran in to report the accident.
The sergeant ran out of the station, across the narrow courtyard and through the gate onto Monument Road - a 30m dash at the most.
He apparently walked calmly towards Odendaal’s car, stopped at the passenger window, pulled out his gun and fired a single, close-range shot into Odendaal’s upper body, before walking back into the police station, car guard Sipho Baloyi alleged.
Seconds later, he came back out to take his first look at the woman. He refused to call an ambulance, allegedly because she was dying.
Baloyi had helped Odendaal to park her car outside the police station.
He said: “As she was driving out, she was trying to reverse, but the car was in first gear, so she bumped into a police van parked outside the station. She tried to reverse again, but the same thing happened.”
Baloyi said he left Odendaal sitting behind the wheel while he went to report the incident.
“A sergeant came around from the charge office and walked out of the station. He didn’t say anything, but walked to her passenger window. He shot her upper arm and it looked like the bullet went through her breast and out of her chest,” he said.
Baloyi said he had pleaded with the sergeant to call the emergency services.
“She’s dying already, there’s no point in calling the ambulance,” he quoted the policeman as saying.
Paramedics declared Odendaal dead at the scene.
High-ranking police officers apparently flooded the streets after hearing the shot being fired.
The sergeant, whose name is known to The Star but cannot be named until he appears in court, allegedly burst into tears as his superiors demanded to know why he had shot a woman who posed no threat and who wasn’t running away.
The sergeant’s firearm and cap were recovered at the scene.
Since witnessing the shooting, Baloyi said he struggled to sleep at night.
“I couldn’t sleep last night, my heart was sore. I can’t understand why he shot the woman,” he said.
“ICD investigators took statements from several witnesses and the sergeant was arrested on the basis of those statements,” said Independent Complaints Directorate spokesman Moses Dlamini. He added that Odendaal hadn’t been armed.
“The suspect was asked to make a statement, but declined. He asked for a legal representative,” Dlamini said.
The policeman, who had apparently worked at the station for a long period, will appear in court tomorrow on a charge of murder.
A postmortem was due to be performed today.
There were suggestions that the sergeant believed someone was trying to steal a police car.
Police said Odendaal’s family expected to travel from Middelburg, Mpumalanga, to identify her body at the Germiston mortuary.
The DA condemned the killing, with its spokeswoman on police Dianne Kohler Barnard saying: “Any police service should work in the best interests of the people it serves to protect, not against them… Over the past few weeks that requirement has been significantly undermined.” - The Star