What’s going on with our killer kids?

There’s a picture of a proud father, Johannes Mehlape, resplendent in a navy-blue suit, black shoes and sky-blue shirt with a striped tie.

His daughter, Mologadi, in a graduation gown worn over red leggings and a red top, leans affectionately against her father’s chest. Her smile is broad, revealing a row of clean white teeth.

His expression is one of contentment. His head tilting to his left, he smiles as if to say: “Now that you’ve finished your degree, I deserve a break for paying for your school fees since you were three. I am incredibly proud, my baby.”

It’s such a beautiful graduation-day photo. Many parents and graduates have similar photos on their social media or framed on walls in their homes.

Now Mehlape is dead and his 28-year-old daughter with the charming smile is among those charged with his murder.

The case is the latest in a string of killings in which children are accused of, or have been convicted of, murdering their parents and other close relatives.

What lies at the heart of parricide?

What of Eugene Botha from Germiston, on trial for the murders of his parents and sister?

In an alleged confession from a holding cell, reported in the Sunday Times last month, he said he had “beaten his mother to death with a hammer on New Year’s Eve, then attacked his sister with it before stabbing her in her neck to finish her off. Botha then waited in the kitchen of the family home through the early hours of New Year’s Day until his father arrived at 6am, then shot him in the back of the head with a 9mm pistol.”

Or Onthatile Sebati, 23, from a nondescript village outside Brits, who hated household chores so much that she arranged for her family to be murdered? Sebati was convicted last month along with her cousins Kagiso and Tumelo Mokone of the murders of her parents, her sister and her brother.

Sebati was just 15 when she came up with the plot to drug her parents with sleeping pills so the father, Solomon Lucky Sebati, could be robbed of his police service pistol. This was then used to kill him, his wife Mmatshepo, a nurse at an old-age home, Sebati’s eight-months pregnant sister Tshegofatso, and their three-year-old brother Quinton.

There’s an option to walk away, but no, the parents must die, even if an eight-months pregnant sister must become a collateral victim. There’s a level of cold-bloodedness that is hard to believe

It all beggars belief that a child, consumed by greed or hatred, simply decides to kill their parents. There’s an option to walk away, but no, the parents must die, even if a sister in an advanced state of pregnancy must become a collateral victim. There’s a level of cold-bloodedness that is hard to believe.

Mologadi Mehlape, before her arrest, cruised around Turfloop in an SUV her father bought her with the proceeds of a policy on her mother, who died from Covid complications. Was this generosity, and a qualification made possible by her parents, not enough for her? No doubt we will learn more in court. 

At a general level, we have become accustomed to, if not inured to, foul play between husbands and wives. Sadly, it’s normal. In many murder investigations, the partner in a relationship automatically becomes the first suspect. But now this spectre of children ordering hits on their own parents, or doing the deed themselves, for insurance and/or just for the sake of killing, is really eye-popping.

In Botha’s case, he allegedly killed the mother and sister using a hammer. He then sat waiting for his father, for about five hours, with a gun and hammer in hand. It’s hard to know what happens in people’s heads when they sit in a kitchen with two dead bodies near them, blood flowing on the floor. But the father must die, so he waited, we are told.

Parenting is difficult.  There is a sense in which parents and children — meaning the whole of society — ought to go through some kind of counselling. The do-it-yourself type of justice children unleash when aggrieved by something as trivial as washing dishes is unbelievable.

It’s easy to point fingers and blame political leaders for all our problems, as we often do ahead of elections. And yes, they do deserve some of the blame. But in truth the first failures start at home with belligerent children. Then they become out of control at school, and later in society at large.

The courts exist to sublimate revenge and ensure order not just in society, but in families too.