Sentencing proceedings in the trial of a teenager convicted of killing four family members with an axe resumed on Tuesday, with an occult specialist and a psychologist expected to testify.
One of the victims was a baby girl.
The teenager was convicted of the multiple murders earlier after he had admitted that he had killed his mother, grandmother, younger brother and his four-month old baby sister. He was 14 years old at the time.
He claimed he had been possessed by a demon at the time after researching Satanism on the internet, which led to him and a friend carrying out a Satanic ritual daily for three days before the mass killing.
Judge Hennie de Vos last Monday postponed the trial in the High Court in Pretoria to allow interviews with the teenager, now aged 16, and with his aunt, his guardian, and with the defence and prosecution teams.
The teenager had been referred to in newspaper reports as the “demon boy”.
He pleaded guilty to the charges in August last year before De Vos, sitting in the Delmas High Court at the time.
State advocate Marika Jansen van Vuuren told the court an occult specialist and sociologist, Kobus Jonker, wanted to consult with the accused and study the defence expert reports about the accused, before he could give an expert opinion in court.
The accused killed his mother, 42, his grandmother, 58, his five-year-old brother and his baby sister. He had used an axe to hack all four the deceased to death on 23 May 2013.
In his plea explanation, the teenager said that on the day of the killings he had smoked cannabis with friends and upon arriving home, he started to feel not like his usual self. There was a noise in his head and a voice calling out ‘kill them, kill them’.
“When I looked at my family I saw them as if they were covered in blood,” the teenager said, adding that he then first hacked his mother, then his grandmother and little brother to death before taking his baby sister outside where he also used the axe to kill her.
After the killings, the teenager said, the voices had no longer been in his head and he had wanted to commit suicide, but could not.
“I felt huge anger in me during this incident,” the teenager testified.
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Read: Satanism expert to see “demon boy”
