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Today marks three years to the day that 28-year-old expectant mother Tshegofatso Pule was brutally murdered.
While her family and close friends remember her as a beautiful free-spirited and bubbly fashionista who still had a lot to offer the beauty industry, the hurt and anger induced by her gruesome murder will remain with them "for a long time".
This year the budding make-up artist would have turned 31 and her unborn daughter, - Kamano (which means relationship in Sesotho) - the name she had carefully selected - would be turning three. She was eight months pregnant at the time of her death.
"We have always been a small family. And we were all excited about her pregnancy. We were looking forward to having a little Tshego running around the yard," her cousin Thabiso Pule told City Press at Tshegofatso's home in Meadowlands Zone 3 in Soweto.
READ: Tshegofatso Pule's killer Ntuthuko Shoba denied leave of appeal
In March last year, her boyfriend – Ntuthuko Shoba – was found guilty of masterminding her murder. Her body was found hanging from a tree with a bullet wound in her chest in Durban Deep, western Johannesburg, on June 5 2020.
A visibly emotional Pule added:
Although Tshegofatso was his cousin, Pule explained that their relationship was that of brother and sister. The 42-year-old opened up to City Press about how his mother adopted Tshegofatso and her brother after their mother - his aunt - passed away.
Tshegofatso was only 14 years old at the time. "That is why my mother [Nnuku] was the hardest hit by Tshegofatso's death."
"Before Tshegofatso's mother passed away, she asked my mother, her sister, to take care of her. So my mother is suffering from guilt so deep that I sometimes think her heart is literally broken. She carries so much guilt," a teary Pule shared.
He recalled how following Tshegofatso's death, his mother visited her sister's grave to ask for forgiveness.
"That is why she is no longer able to speak to anyone but the family about her daughter [Tshegofatso]. It hurts too much. She has had incidents where she collapses or just becomes weak. Her health has taken a knock."
The father of two shared how his four-year-old daughter dreams about or cries for her late aunt. He added that his 10-year-old niece wrote a poem about violence against women and girls as part of a school assignment and questioned why Shoba took her aunt's life.
THE AGONISING TASK
Pule painfully recalled how just days after his family had reported Tshegofatso missing he had the agonising task of identifying his cousin's body.
Tshegofatso had left home on June 4 2020, the day before her body was found. She had asked her aunt not to lock the gate because she would be back home later.
However, that was not to be.
READ: Remembering Tshegofatso Pule’s last days
"I am the one who had to go and identify the body [at the mortuary]. I remember it was around 2am on that morning."
He was asked to do so through photographs and not be physically present in the room where Tshegofatso's body lay.
He said:
However, Pule's most excruciating task was yet to come. He had to break the news to his mother. "She collapsed on the spot."
FIGHT AGAINST VIOLENCE ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN STILL ON
Handing down his judgment last year, Judge Stuart Wilson explained how Shoba had taken advantage of Tshegofatso.
"She was a vulnerable woman looking for care and, as her pregnancy progressed, she relied more and more on Shoba, which led to him seeing both her and the unborn child as an inconvenience," he said at the time. He added: “Shoba was the prime mover in bringing about Tshegofatso's death, having planned and commissioned it".
READ: Shoba gets life sentence for brutal murder of Tshegofatso Pule
On Tuesday, Police Minister Bheki Cele released the quarterly crime statistics which revealed that between January and March this year, more than 6 200 people were murdered. The latest figures translate to almost 70 murders a day in South Africa.
While the majority of the victims were adult men, 969 were women and 245 were children. The murders of women showed an increase of 71 compared to the same period last year, while there was a decrease of 19.6% in child murders.
THE DEATH PENALTY, ANGER, NO REMORSE
Botlhale Modisane, a friend who knew Tshegofatso since she was a teenager, shared how she was angered by how Tshegofatso had been judged for her death.
She angrily said:
The 40-year-old, who is also the spokesperson of the Tshegofatso Pule Foundation, believes South Africa is far from winning the fight against femicide and violence against women and girls.
"How can we win this war when in this day and age we have police stations that turn victims of such violence away and tell women to go home and sort things out with their partners?"
READ: #ShowHisFace | The faces of the men who murder
"The way they just killed her and left her body out there for any passerby to see. It's like they were trying to completely destroy every bit of her dignity. It's one thing to murder her and another to leave her hanging like that."
Pule shared Modisane's sentiments and was adamant that forgiving Shoba was not an option for him, adding that although he is behind bars, prison " is still too good for him [Shoba]".
"He has never shown any remorse for what he did, not even during the court proceedings. Every time I saw him there, everything in me just wanted to punch him," Pule said, adding that, to this day, Shoba's family had made "no effort to contact us let alone apologise for what their son did".
