A dog’s red collar fastened around the branches of a milkwood sapling marks the grave of Sugar – Jon Kinnell’s dog that was hit by a car and killed at Salem, 25km south-west of Grahamstown, on Friday 10 July.
A dog’s red collar fastened around the branches of a milkwood sapling marks the grave of Sugar – Jon Kinnell’s dog that was hit by a car and killed at Salem, 25km south-west of Grahamstown, on Friday 10 July.
“I think she was frightened by the men who attacked Jon and ran off into the road,” said Jon’s wife Madeline Kinnell, 71. Sugar was a border collie crossbreed.
Madeline was speaking to Grocott’s Mail three days after the vicious attack on her and her husband at their home on a smallholding west of the village’s historic church.
When news came to the family on Monday 13 July that the burnt-out remains of the bakkie the attackers had made off in had been found, Jon, 70, was still in hospital being treated for a punctured lung.
Several broken ribs were among the injuries inflicted on him with a crowbar during two hours of torment.
There have not yet been any arrests.
The Salem community is in shock at the cruel attack on the couple, who have lived there for 12 years.
“This is the first farm attack in the area,” said Tim, her son who had come to change the locks and help clean up the mess.
“Everyone is on edge.” Madeline and Jon’s nightmare began around 5.15pm on Friday 10 July.
“I’d just finished watching the 5pm news when I heard the dog barking,” said Madeline.
“Jon had gone to lock the gate and I did hear some voices, so I assumed he was talking to someone outside.”
The next thing she knew, masked men were bursting into the room, dragging Jon, already badly beaten, with them.
They told Madeline they would cut his throat, then hers, unless she told them where the guns were, and the money.
‘Where is the doctor?’ “We have no guns,” Madeline said. “I had R500 in my bag, which they’d already emptied out.”
The men then tied Madeline up, blindfolded her, gagged her and put something over her head.
“They all had their faces covered,” said Madeline, who heard them ransack the house, pushing over shelves and ripping clothes and other possessions out of cupboards.
“I assume they still believed there were guns somewhere,” said Madeline.
Madeline was puzzled by this conviction, as well as the fact that they kept asking “Where is the doctor?” At first she thought they were referring to the fact that members of the community in the village often come to her for first-aid treatment for minor injuries.
But even after she explained this, they kept asking the same question. Among the many things the men grabbed were dozens of tins of cat food, and a cooked chicken.
They took time to make and eat sandwiches while they were in the house.
They took clothes, sheets and duvets (they weren’t even new, Madeline said, “they were rubbed through in the place where your heels go”). They didn’t take any tools.
They didn’t take the gas cylinders. They didn’t take a jar of Jacobs coffee: they took some Five Roses teabags.
They took cellphones – old clunky models that only worked while they were plugged in.
“The same with the old laptop they took – it wasn’t even working,” Tim said.
The only almost-new thing in the house was a television set Madeline and Jon’s children had bought them for Christmas.
“They took that,” Tim said. In the 12 years the couple have lived in Salem, he said, the only incident was when a beehive got broken into.
The couple keep bees, and on the evening Jon was attacked, he’d been to lock the gate and was on his way to check on the bees.
“This is where they beat him,” Tim explained, pointing to a dark patch in the soil. “That’s blood.”
Walking over to the side wall of the house, he said, “This is where they dragged him to and left him.”
Tim has praise for the police. “They were on the ball,” he said. “They responded quickly and there must have been about 20 of them.”
She also called the one neighbour whose number she remembered – “the others were all on my cellphone and they took those” – and very soon around the same number of community members were at the house.
The neighbour called Tim, who raced to the house.
The ambulance was the weak link, only arriving around 8.30pm, Tim said.
“I think it was because we called them in the middle of a change of shift.” The police had been alerted by Hi-Tech security, after Madeline finally managed to press the panic button.
Easy target Madeline was back in her house on Monday morning, cleaning Jon’s blood off the floor and walls, and assembling what was left of their possessions after the gang ransacked the house.
“You know a church service lasts about an hour and a half and it can seem long,” she said.
“This lasted about two hours and it felt like forever.” Jon was a very easy target, says Tim. He was finally in recovery from cancer and was getting better – but he was extremely frail.
“He’d lost about 40kg,” said Madeline. “They didn’t need to beat him like that to stop him being a threat to them. There was no way he could have begun to resist them in his state.”
Sugar’s grave is poignant. But even more sad – and a sign of how much this attack has already changed Jon and Madeline’s lives, and their family’s – is what Madeline says at the end of our visit.
“I won’t have my grandchildren to stay here again,” she says. The youngest, their granddaughter, is 3. “If they were vicious enough to do that to someone as frail as Jon was, who knows what else they could do.”
And Tim says, “If they have no compunction about hurting someone who is vulnerable…” As for the couple’s immediate and longer term future in their house, Tim says, “My mother is a stoic. She’s not one to give up.”
That spirit comes through when she says, “By the way, I object to what you wrote over the weekend.”
Grocott’s Mail published a story about the attack on Jon and Madeline on our website the next day.
“You said ‘an elderly couple’,” she remonstrated. “You should have said ‘an elderly man and his young wife!” Resilience and humour hide the shock of losing her sense of safety.
"We've always lived with our doors open. We even use to sleep with a door open to save getting up to let the dogs in and out." Madeline has no thought of moving away from Salem.
“This is our home – where would we go?”
“We’ll upgrade our security, be that much more cautious. But this is our life.”
Grahamstown’s crime intelligence officer, Captain Milanda Coetzer on Saturday said, “Police are investigating a case of farm attack, house robbery, attempted murder, assault with grievous bodily harm and theft of motor vehicle.”
Police confirmed on Wednesday 15 July that a Nissan Hardbody found burnt out in Port Alfred on Saturday 11 July was the Kinnells' vehicle.
Coetzer, said in a statement on Wednesday 15 July that the police were following all available leads.
"Warrant Officer Hambile Stefane is investigating the case and anyone with further information on this matter is asked to make contact with him at Seven Fountains SAPS on 046 622 7333 or 071 9619 421," Coetzer said.
“The police wish to thank the Salem area farmers and all the departments who assisted the couple that night.”
