Kutlwano Olifant
“I saw him die in my arms. His lips turned blue, and he took a deep breath. It was not easy watching the man you love die.”
Kelly Khumalo is distraught and destroyed, mourning the loss of her boyfriend. She has spoken to no one except her trusted friend and biographer Melinda Ferguson. On Tuesday night, she poured her heart out to the writer about the horror on Sunday night when armed men stormed her house, shooting her football star boyfriend Senzo Meyiwa.
All the men took was a cellphone. All it took was a single shot fired at Meyiwa, the Bafana Bafana captain and Orlando Pirates soccer star. He died en route to hospital.
“I have never seen a person so distressed like her. Every piece of her was broken,” Ferguson told The Star yesterday about her visit to the singer’s Mulbarton townhouse.
Meyiwa was visiting Khumalo, the mother of one of his three daughters, at her mother’s Vosloorus, Ekurhuleni, home. Ferguson, who visited Khumalo to comfort her, said Meyiwa had gone out earlier on Sunday to support the singer at one of her performances.
“They spent the day together. Later they went to Vosloorus, and according to her (Khumalo), Senzo wanted them to spend the night there (at her mother’s house). They were with Senzo’s friends at the time. These people were just having fun. She said Senzo wanted to be at her home, where she had grown up. But Kelly says she insisted that they leave,” Ferguson said.
Khumalo, according to Ferguson, had told her the shooting took place in the kitchen.
Meyiwa’s killers, she said, had been “very aggressive and (appeared to be) under the influence of nyaope” when they attacked her family.
“Kelly drove him to the hospital,” she said.
Khumalo and Meyiwa had been living together in a serious relationship for more than five months and spent most of the time together at the townhouse. It is going to take time before she forgets what really happened,” said Ferguson. “She said to me ‘We were so happy together. Everything was coming right, as if we were now living our dream,” she added.
Ferguson said Khumalo’s eldest child, fathered by convicted musician Molemo “Jub Jub” Maarohanye, had watched Meyiwa get shot.
“Senzo was like a father figure to that boy. Now both these children don’t have their fathers. Kelly said to me ‘What am I gonna do? I have two children whose fathers are gone”.