A Family Destroyed

The partner of a man shot and killed by his father in a triple killing pours her heart out about her night of horror

- Jana Van Der Merwe

THE house looks creepy. Even though it’s daylight the curtains are drawn – as if trying to shield the world from the terrors that took place inside.

Behind the high palisade fence two dogs yap in the deserted yard. Jack Russell Spike and dachshund Troy are desperate for their owners to come back but Vanecia Becker hasn’t felt strong enough yet to set foot in the house in Germiston on the East Rand – so for the moment friends are popping in occasionally to feed the two animals.

You can understand why Vanecia (29) is reluctant to return. It’s here that the man who was to become her father-inlaw, Johan Brody (64), shot and killed her fiancé, David (38), along with his two other children, Tanya (37) and Anna-Marie (33), before turning his .22-pistol on himself. Vanecia believes it’s a miracle she and her nine-year-old son, Kian, escaped death that night. But she’s given up trying to fathom what it was that made Johan decide to spare her and his grandchild.

“He was a monster,” the stay-at-home mom tells us in the chilly lounge of her aunt’s home in Randburg, Johannesburg, where she’s now staying with Kian and Ava, a puppy David rescued from the street. This is where she now faces the task of explaining to her only child why he’ll never see his dad again.

BEFORE the shooting David was concerned about his father’s state of mind. Something was wrong, and he knew it.

“Lord, please hold my hand tightly tonight,” Johan wrote on Facebook late in the afternoon before the shootings, seemingly depressed again. Vanecia didn’t think anything of it and told David before going to bed, “Your dad is at it again.”

At 2.30am Johan phoned his son in the cottage on the property where he and Vanecia lived.