SOUTH AFRICA – A Zimbabwean mother of nine yesterday pleaded with the North Gauteng High Court not to send her husband to jail for killing their three-year-old son because she and her children needed him at home to provide for them.
Dirica Chipeta told the court she and her children had forgiven her husband, Vincent Mugwagwa, for killing their son Wesley in a fit of anger at their Pretoria West home in June last year.
Judge Nico Coetzee found Mugwagwa guilty of murder after he pleaded guilty, saying he had been very angry at the time and could not understand how he could have killed his beloved son.
Chipeta told the court she accepted her husband had killed the child, but asked the court to give him community service so that he could work to support her, their three children and older children still in Zimbabwe.
Chipeta, an asylum seeker, was unemployed and she and the children had been living on hand-outs and charity from church members since her husband’s arrest. They faced living on the street once the house in Pretoria West where they now lived had been sold.
“I am begging this court to consider my situation,” she said.She said her husband had always been a loving, caring father and husband. “I was shocked when it happened. Even now I can’t believe it happened and what got into him. He was very close to his children,” she said.
Mugwagwa, a qualified mechanic, testified that he and his wife had an argument that morning because she had accused him of an affair on the say-so of others, although it was not the truth.
He had asked her to move out and became angry when she was still there on his return home and chased her and the children out of the house. He followed them to the neighbour where they sought shelter.
“That’s when it just happened. I remember my little daughter came and held my hand and said ‘pappa, you’ve hit the child’,” he said. Mugwagwa admitted hitting his son several times on the head with a pick handle, as a result of which he died in hospital four days later.
The trial will continue on Friday. The Citizen
