French priest Father Louis Blondel devoted 22 years of his life to uplift the poor, and he loved the people he worked with. Yet, the Pretoria High Court heard he was shot dead, execution-style, by one of these people for a computer, R50 and a cellphone.
While the State called for his killer, Nelson Malope, to be jailed for a long time, the 20-year-old’s lawyer asked for a non-custodial sentence, saying Malope was an example of how the youth, due to lack of parental control, as well as drug use in the townships, nowadays strayed.
Malope also asked for Blondel’s family, in France, and members of his congregation, to forgive him. “I am sorry, I did not know what I was doing. I wanted money for beer and drugs,” he told the court.
Malope asked Judge Vivian Mngqibisa-Thusi not to send him to jail, as he wanted to go home and “make things right”.
His parents, Ester and Isaac Malope, also pleaded for mercy for their son. They said they wanted to take him home and promised to keep a better eye on him.
Father Sean O’Leary, who knew Blondel for 22 years, told the court that the Catholic Church did not want revenge – it only wanted justice to be done.
Blondel was gunned down in his Diepsloot parish on April 7, 2009, by Malope, who went there with a gang of his friends – to “fetch” a computer. He was 18 at the time and the rest of the gang were teenagers.
The four others implicated in the housebreaking, robbery and murder pleaded not guilty to the charges and they will be tried in the high court in February next year.
Malope, who admitted to all the charges, on Thursday said he would testify against his mates.
He said he had smoked the drug nyaope at the time. But he said he had now come to his senses in this regard as the drug caused him to “make mistakes”.
He said he had left his parental home in Groblersdal and went to Diepsloot to visit a friend for a few days. Here he met his co-accused and they went to a tavern, where they found a gun and bullets.
Someone also “placed an order” for a computer and he and his friends went to the parsonage which Blondel shared with Father Guido Bourgeois. Both priests were in their 70s.
Blondel was shot when he woke up and confronted the burglars at his bedroom door. The court heard he was shot, point-blank, in the head.
Ester Malope, while wiping tears away, said her son was a good boy who never gave her problems. Asked how she felt about what he had done, she said: “I don’t know what to say. This thing hurts me a lot, but I want him to stay out of prison and to come home.”
His father, who also wants his son to come home “right now”, said he too felt bad, but added that if his son was guilty, he should “face the music”.
O’Leary, in taking the stand for the State, said Blondel had moved to Diepsloot four months prior to his murder. Before that he was in Orange Farm and Soweto, where he had set up a trade school to help the poor in obtaining skills.
He was about to set one up in Diepsloot, but it never got off the ground after his death. His death was a huge blow for the community and the church.
Asked what sentence the Catholic Church would want to see, he said if it was only theft, they would ask for a lenient term.
But he added that a message had to be sent to killers, especially those who killed priests. “If not properly punished, they will say, ‘if we want to kill someone, kill a priest, because he’s an easy target’.”
He said the church was looking for justice, not revenge.
Asked by the defence whether the church was not all about forgiving, the Father answered: “Let us first have justice. I am sure our God and the community and friends will forgive him. But first things first. We are not in a Church here.”
The matter was postponed to September 5 to obtain reports. - Pretoria News
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