HAPPY TAIL SNIFFING OUT BLACK DIAMONDS
“GOD, please lead my son to the right path. There are demons troubling him.”
This was the prayer that TV and radio personality Hope Zinde shared with her friend and colleague Anele Dhlamini over the past six months.
“Although she didn’t go into details as to what those demons were, or what could be troubling her son, I could feel a deep pain, sadness and disappointment,” said Dhlamini, who worked with Zinde at the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa. “You couldn’t help but hold her hand. She loved her son and would do anything for him.”
Zinde’s death has left her family shocked and confused, as she “literally lived” for her 23-year-old son, Mark, who has been arrested in connection with her murder.
She bought him a flat in Pretoria so that he could be close to Varsity College in Hatfield, where he was studying towards a BCom.
Another friend said she had bought him a Mercedes-Benz.
Many are mystified at how Mark could have gone from being a top pupil at the private Pecanwood College in 2010 — where he achieved two distinctions in matric and played basketball and first-team rugby — to becoming a drug addict accused of killing his mother.
Zinde, 50, who was also a former board member at the SABC, was found in the boot of her car in her garage last Saturday, after her mother, Audrey Zinde, and her sister Fikile Zinde, went looking for her because she had not returned their calls for several days.
In the Brits Magistrate’s Court on Friday, it emerged that Mark, who had recently moved back in with his mother at Pecanwood Estate in Hartbeespoort, had refused to allow Audrey and Fikile into the house.
It is believed Zinde had already been dead for several days. Mark only opened the door when the police were called.
Mark was found in possession of drugs, believed to be crystal meth, and a 10kg weight covered in blood was recovered from the house.
On Friday he was sent for psychiatric evaluation at Weskoppies, after an application by Audrey‚ who said Mark was not mentally stable. She said he had been in drug rehab at Vista Clinic in 2013.
She said her daughter had “noted certain behavioural patterns” in Mark‚ including withdrawal, aggression, violence and poor insight. He would also lock himself in his room, she said.
Zinde’s uncle, Jackson Letshufi, said he suspected Mark had clashed with his mother over his drugs.
“Hope had raised concerns with the family about his drug use and was planning to send him to rehabilitation,” Letshufi told the Sunday Times after Zinde’s memorial service on Friday in Pretoria.
He said Zinde had spent the weekend in Mamelodi and had returned home on Monday last week.
“We think that when she got home on Monday, she found him under the influence. They clashed and the boy did what he did.”
Letshufi said he did not believe Mark was alone when his mother was murdered. “On Sunday when we arrived at the police station, we were told two people had visited him earlier in the morning and had brought him food.”
A friend of Zinde said Mark was using heroin and nyaope.