Woman testified how she rammed into a car whose occupants were shooting at her son as he was on his way to court in Blue Downs.
“I saw they were shooting at my child and the car,” said Wendy Brown, the widow of the late well-known Kleinvlei businessman Hampshire “Hempies” Brown.
When she heard the shots and realised her son’s life was in danger, she swerved into the assailant’s Honda on the road near the court.
“Everything happened so quickly. “For me, they had just shot at my child. I had to do something,” the diminutive Brown said through tears.
She testified her son and the driver in the bakkie he was in sped away to safety, and she followed them to check on her son.
They got out of the cars and asked each other: “Are you alright? Are you alright?” and they all were unscathed.
Elcardo Adams, allegedly the leader of the Mobsters gang, and 13 other men are on trial in the Western Cape High Court on charges that include murder.
They deny any involvement in gangs or organised crime nor rivalry with another gang, the Horribles.
Brown and her late husband owned the well-known Hempies Bottle Store and Wendy’s Nightclub in Kleinvlei, Cape Town.
Her husband was shot dead in February 2018, right in front of her in the parking lot of their businesses.
But this was not to be the last tragedy in the family.
Brown’s son, Corne, a promising rugby player with Belhar Spurs, had just returned from court on the day of the shooting in Blue Downs on 11 March 2019, after an earlier appearance for the alleged possession of drugs.
He had been told to go back to the court and was on his way there in a black bakkie with another man when the shooting occurred.
He survived that assassination attempt, but Corne Brown was ultimately shot while DJing near Ceres in 2020, and later died.
A Brown relative, Chevonne, was shot dead outside Brown’s house on 21 December 2018.
On that occasion, Brown heard shots fired while Chevonne and a small child went to buy electricity and litchis at a shop.
She instructed everyone in the house to lie on the floor and “stay down” until the shooting stopped. She went outside and saw Chevonne in the driver’s seat, her head lolled to the left, dead.
The State asked Brown directly if her late husband was affiliated with any gang or belonged to a gang.
Between moments to wipe her eyes and blow her nose during the emotional testimony, she replied he had no gang tattoos – only two tattoos of his daughter’s name and his granddaughter’s name.
She said:
But people came to the house, who I knew were gangsters.
She pointed some of them out in court, referring to them by nicknames like “Ore” but said she did not hear their conversations, because the men would retire to the entertainment area at the back of the house, and she would stay inside the house.
Only once, she heard her husband shouting at one of them over the phone.
When he put the phone down, he grumbled about “die fo**en laaitie gaan kak maak”, and the court interpreter obliged with an English translation: “This f**king boy is going to make shit.”
There was no laughter from the dock.
Brown said she only knew the Horribles and Mobsters gangs were based in Kleinvlei and the Beach Cats were based in Eerste River.
She added she knew some of the Horribles because they came in and out of the bottle store but did not know who their leader was.
Asked whether the leader of the Horribles was her late husband, Hampshire, she testified she never asked him directly.
“I never asked him: ‘Are you the leader of a gang’?” she replied.
But, Brown said, people walked and talked with great respect when in his presence.
The trial continues on Tuesday.
Source News24
