Van Breda grilled over loss of consciousness
TRIPLE murder accused Henri van Breda has told the Western Cape High Court he wasn’t interested in explaining himself to the doctor who examined him after a brutal attack on his family in January 2015.
During cross-examination yesterday, Van Breda said he hadn’t told Dr Michelle van Zyl that he had lost consciousness for over two hours after the vicious axe attacks on his family that left his parents and brother dead, and his sister, Marli, fighting for her life.
Van Breda claims he fell down the stairs after throwing the axe, used in the murders, at the intruder.
He explained that once the intruder or intruders had fled, he tried to call his girlfriend but the call went straight to voicemail. He then returned upstairs and lost consciousness, perhaps from the “shock” of seeing his dead mother.
Two hours and 40 minutes passed before he tried to contact emergency services, yet he failed to tell the doctor that information when he was examined on the evening of January 27.
Senior prosecutor Susan Galloway said: “This event of you losing consciousness randomly, is it not to address the 2 hours 40 minutes lost in the timeline?”
Van Breda insisted that was not the case.
Galloway again raised discrepancies between his plea explanation and initial police statement.
“In your plea explanation you said you heard Rudi making gurgling sounds, and you said he was moving violently. In the statement you make only one reference to Rudi saying he was just lying there while being attacked.”
She put it to him that his later claim that his brother had been thrashing around on the bed, was in fact to fit in with blood spatter expert Captain Marius Joubert’s theory that Rudi had been “handled” on the scene as his body was not found on the bed, but was on the floor next to the bathroom door.
Van Breda said the police had “misrepresented” his words.
Galloway also questioned why he had not simply called emergency numbers that were on the fridge instead of Google searching them.
“I felt I would be doing more by finding the number myself,” he said.
Galloway said he could have called neighbour Stephanie Op’t Hof and that she could have assisted by placing towels on his mother or Marli’s head to stem the bleeding.
Van Breda insisted he felt it would be better to “speak directly to the people who were going to help”.
He also felt contacting security officers at the estate where they lived would have been “an indirect way of getting help”. – ANA