Cape Town - A young man who owed money to a drug dealer was found dead at his former school in Bonteheuwel on Tuesday. He had been disembowelled.
Anrich Isaacs, 22, was stabbed multiple times, and his body left among the flowers on the field of Arcadia Secondary School, where he was a star athlete until he left in 2006.
Police arrested two men, aged 30 and 32, from Bonteheuwel, said police spokesman Captain FC van Wyk.
School safety officer Hadijah Fisher was among the first people to find Isaacs’s body. She had been walking across the field to take her grandson to Arcadia Primary. She said Isaacs’ arm was across his face, as if to shield off a blow.
The victim’s mother, Lorna Isaacs, told Bishop Lavis police that her son owed a drug dealer money.
In an interview with the Cape Argus, Lorna said her son had been a “good boy” and only started using drugs in August, when he fell in with a “bad group” in Kalksteenfontein.
“He used to make me laugh,” she said. “He said, ‘Mummy, you’re my gold, you’re my everything’.”
Chris Arendse, acting principal at Arcadia Secondary School, said pupils were not traumatised by Isaacs’s mutilated body and that they had crowded around his body for most of the morning.
“The sense of lawlessness and drug abuse is a problem that pervades Bonteheuwel. In the light of so many murders and bodies I think the children have become desensitised.”
Arendse said that far from discouraging pupils from getting involved with drugs or gangs, “these incidents actually encourage students to become gangsters”.
“As educators, we try to use this as an example. We say ‘this is your final destination if you join a gang’. But the power of gangs is much greater than the fear that you’re going to die.”
Van Wyk said there has been a murder and six attempted murders in the area in the past two months.
Cape Argus