Top Billing presenters’ families share grief

THE families of late Top Billing presenters Simba Mhere and Kady-Shay O’Bryan yesterday shared their grief at the sentencing hearing of the driver found guilty of causing their deaths in a car accident.

“Twenty nine years‚ 22 days is all the time I had with my sister in this world. While I cherish every one of the days I had with her‚ how many memories could have been made in the days‚ months‚ years to come had you not taken her from us‚” Duane O’Bryan said in a statement he read out in the Randburg Magistrate’s Court yesterday.

“One second is all it took for Kady and Simba to leave this world. One second and a negligent act by a person who has showed zero remorse or sorrow for what you have taken from us and the Mhere family‚” he said.

“We were extremely close‚” he told the court.

Mhere and O’Bryan‚ who was a passenger in the car Mhere was driving‚ died at the scene of the accident on William Nicol Drive in Fourways‚ Johannesburg‚ on January 31‚ 2015.

During the trial‚ the court heard evidence from a tracking company that the vehicle had been speeding before the accident. At one stage‚ it was travelling at 166km/h along William Nicol Drive.

During judgment‚ magistrate David Mahango found that Preshalin Naidoo’s version that the car he was driving on the morning of the accident had a mechanical defect was fabricated and improbable. Mahango also rejected the evidence of the defence’s accident reconstruction expert that speed could not have caused the accident and that it was as a result of a missing nut in the right-front suspension of Naidoo’s car.