Rohdes’ ‘battle’ described

THE back of his hand connected with her face‚ his elbow connected with her nose and he grabbed her neck with his right hand and pushed and pulled her out of the way.

This apparently caused some of the injuries sustained by Susan Rohde before she died last year. Her husband‚ Jason Rohde‚ is on trial in the Cape Town High Court for her murder.

These admissions were made by his defence team yesterday in a turnabout after attacking state pathologist Dr Akmal Coetzee-Khan’s postmortem findings.

In a statement read by Advocate Graham van der Spuy‚ Rohde recalls events portraying Susan as “angry‚ irrational and very‚ very aggressive”.

They were at a company conference in Stellenbosch. His mistress, Jolene Alterskye, was also present.

Rohde claimed that Susan became enraged when he tried to delete a message from Alterskye.

When he tried to leave the room, he claimed, Susan blocked him‚ wearing only a white robe.

“The accused grabbed her bathrobe and tried to pull her out of the way. He grabbed her neck with his right hand and pulled her.

“As he tried to leave‚ she grabbed his collar. He swung around and hit her face with the back of his hand.”

Trying to ward her off‚ “his elbow connected with her nose” and she “fell headlong into a garden over a low wall and onto her right side”.

Van der Spuy put the events to Coetzee-Khan so that he could determine whether they explained injuries he had noted. Coetzee-Khan said some of them would make sense. – TimesLIVE