“Nobody will ever understand how traumatic it is to be attacked in your home and have your husband killed in front of you. I am battling to come to terms with this. When I close my eyes, the attack plays out in my mind like a movie.”
This is how the widow of former Mac’s Motorbike Club vice-president Jan Engelbrecht feels more than two years after a gang broke into their Keerweer Street home in Booysens, Pretoria.
Merinda Engelbrecht’s husband was shot dead while running to the aid of his family, who were wrestling the attackers outside.
Ernest Masipa of Phomolong, west of Atteridgeville, was the only member of the gang to be caught. The Pretoria High Court, however, yesterday acquitted him of Engelbrecht’s murder.
Judge Nomonde Mngqibisa-Thusi convicted him of robbery with aggravating circumstances - the only one out of all the charges he had earlier pleaded guilty to.
The judge found that Masipa had already fled the premises by the time Jan Engelbrecht was shot.
Masipa admitted that he and the rest of the gang planned to rob the Engelbrechts, and he knew that two of the members were armed.
But the State had not proved that he associated himself with the act of killing Engelbrecht, the judge said. He had in fact already left the premises by the time the first shot (outside the house) was fired, she said.
The gang broke into the house in the early hours of September 8, 2008. A gun-wielding man entered the bedroom of the Engelbrechts’ daughter Megan and demanded her cellphone. Another also entered her room, but the two fled when they heard a commotion outside.
Megan meanwhile went to her father’s bedroom and found a man standing over him, aiming his gun at him. This man also ran outside when he heard a shot being fired in the bedroom.
At the time, Merinda and her sons Evan and Marcelle were outside, confronting the robbers.
Megan and her father ran out to help them, but her father was hit in the chest by a bullet as he stepped outside.
Blows and shots were exchanged, but the robbers managed to get away. They took jewellery and other valuables, which were never recovered.
Masipa earlier said he was already down the road by the time the first shots were fired. He denied he was ever inside the house. He had stood outside a window while the others handed him the loot.
The Engelbrecht family had their share of being crime victims, Merinda Engelbrecht said yesterday. Her husband was robbed five months before being killed.
She and Megan were again robbed five months later when they walked into a store. The robbers again stole her jewellery and took her handbag, in which she kept a note her late husband had written to her. “It is not going well with us. We are receiving counselling, but one cannot just wipe out what happened. Our whole lives have been turned upside down, and my soul mate was taken from me,” Merinda said. - Pretoria News