He helped put up posters when his eight-year-old son went missing, but now Junaid Desai, who pleaded guilty to his murder, is “prepared to pay the price”.
“I should get life imprisonment for what I did,” Desai told Judge Willem Louw from the witness stand in court 13 in the Western Cape High Court yesterday, where he sobbed bitterly, wiping away tears and clasping his head in his hands.
“I can’t describe how I feel about myself. At night, before I go to bed, I always think about (Yunus) and that is what hurts me.”
Yunus’s decomposing body was found in a field in Mitchells Plain last year after he had been missing for 11 days. He had been strangled.
“I am terribly sorry and prepared to pay the price no matter what sentence they give me. I know I can’t bring him back,” Desai went on, reading from a letter he had written the night before, addressed particularly to the boy’s mother and his estranged wife at the time, Rene Jonkers.
“My heart is afraid it will have to suffer for the rest of my life,” he said.
Desai said Yunus had been their “pride and joy every minute and every second of the day”. “I am asking you to please forgive me. I know sorry won’t bring him back, but just remember the good old days we had as a family.”
Desai told the court that when he was with Yunus the boy had always complained about circumstances at his home with his mother during the time they were separated.
Desai said he couldn’t see a way out, even though he had contacted a social worker.
“I loved him very much. The bond that we had – although I was his father, I was his friend too.”
Desai said when he committed the crime he was “scared” to tell anyone.
“But when they arrested me, I confessed to it. I did kill him,” he said.
When Judge Louw put it to him that the State would most likely argue that the only reason he didn’t come forward earlier was because he hoped to get away with it, Desai said he would never have thought of that. “I know myself. I wouldn’t have been able to live with it. It would be like a nightmare. I wouldn’t be true to myself or my Creator so the best was to be honest.
“I could have told the police that I didn’t do it, but I told them that I was the one.”
Meanwhile, holding up a framed portrait of her son, an emotional Jonkers told the court that her heart was broken and that Desai deserved a life sentence – before an argument broke out between her and Desai in court.
Addressing Desai, she said: “Your life will still go on. Your mother and father can still visit you. I will never see my son again.
“Look into his eyes, Junaid. What did you do to our child?”
Jonker said she had trusted Desai when he picked up his son on weekends because she knew that the two had a good relationship. “Junaid was his role model,” she wept.
State advocate Nadia Ajam dismissed Desai’s display of remorse, saying that he had spoken with a “forked tongue”.
She urged the court to send out a stern message to society that the murder of children was a serious offence.
Sentencing is expected on Tuesday.
[email protected] - Cape Times