Decade-long saga comes to an end

IT WAS a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon towards the end of November. The year was 2003. Little did anyone in Vryheid know that at Vryheid Police Station that afternoon, negligence among the policemen on duty would enable eight awaiting-trial prisoners to escape, one of them with a weapon taken from a policeman.

Before the afternoon was over, one of the prisoners had shot and killed Boeren Street resident Lood Krause, wounded his wife Carol, and wounded another Vryheid resident Richard Grobler.

The escapees had made their way down Mark Street to High Street where, presumably, they scattered, with the armed prisoner, Steve Mtshali, making his way down High Street towards Cenaw Court. He was nearly knocked over by a car in High Street, and eventually made his way down the panhandle between the Moth Hall and Cenaw Court.

There, the shooting started when Mtshali opened fire on the motorist. This panhandle gave access to a townhouse complex and to the Krause’s yard.

Richard Grobler, an off-duty Correctional Services officer, was wounded when he looked over the garden wall to investigate the shots he’d heard. Mtshali entered the Krause home, shot dead Lood Krause and wounded his wife Carol.

The sequence of events then becomes blurred. Mtshali disappeared, although no one ever answered the question as to where the police thought he’d disappeared to. In fact, he’d hidden himself in the house, locked in the toilet.

He was discovered and after “intense negotiation” was re-arrested.

In mid December that year, Mtshali was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment for the murder of Lood Krause.

Other escapees were arrested in Dundee, and in the Kambula and Scheepersnek areas.

More than a decade later, on Wednesday, June 11, this year, in the Pietermaritzburg High Court, compensatory amounts for Carol Krause and Richard Grobler were agreed to by the legal team representing the Minister of Safety and Security.

The amounts have not been divulged, and as part of the settlement in this case of police negligence, neither Krause nor Grobler are permitted to speak to the media.