Adelaide, Australia - Reasons for the brutal slaying of a South African family in Adelaide, allegedly at the hands of their next-door neighbour, are a mystery.
The family, identified by the website AdelaideNow as the Mombers, originally from Pretoria, had told neighbours they had immigrated to Australia because of fear for their children’s safety in South Africa.
Luc, 41, and his wife Rika’s parents, who had been visiting from South Africa, were gunned down on Friday, allegedly by a man who lived next door to them.
The Mombers’ son, Marcel, 14, was shot and wounded, and one of the first policemen on the scene was shot in the face. The policeman, his jaw broken and his face bleeding, managed to call for back-up.
The motive for the shooting, which led to an eight-hour siege in the blue-collar suburb of Hectorville, is still a mystery, say investigators, but some neighbours claim it may have involved the death of the alleged killer’s dog, which had been poisoned.
Neighbours said they had been woken at about 2.30am on Friday by gunshots.
“We heard some (loud) gunshots and obviously a lot of commotion, police cars and all the rest of it and then helicopters,” one neighbour said. Another, Maree Rumeliotis, said she was woken by two loud bangs.
“You expect to hear about things like this in big cities like Sydney.”
As police arrived, the gunman fled from the house to a neighbouring house and opened fire. Police returned fire, and a policeman was shot in the face.
The holed-up gunman told the police negotiators he was prepared to kill. At noon he surrendered.
Police found the bullet-riddled bodies of Luc Mombers and his in-laws, Kobus and Annetjie Snyman, aged 64 and 65, in the Mombers’s house. The Snymans were to have flown back to South Africa yesterday.
The wounded policeman is in an induced coma and Marcel is in a stable condition in hospital. The Mombers’s older daughter, Alicia, was staying at a friend’s house at the time, and a boy, 11, staying at the house escaped injury by hiding in a bedroom.
Denato Anthony Corbo, 39, has been charged with three counts of murder and two of attempted murder. He has been refused bail and will appear in court tomorrow. He could face life in prison if convicted.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the murders may have been the result of accusations that someone had poisoned Corbo’s dog.
The newspaper also reported that Corbo, who was living with his parents, was known to police before the incident. Neighbours claimed he had mental health issues.
Detectives, forensic investigators and uniformed police were still at the scene yesterday, where they seized several guns from Corbo’s home.
Hubert Mombers, the 70-year-old father of slain Luc, told AdelaideNow his son had left Pretoria for a safer life in Adelaide. Mombers said his son’s family had been happy in Australia, where Luc was a maintenance worker at Adelaide Airport.
“They were going to Australia especially for the kids so that they could have a nicer, brighter future. If my son was killed in an accident, I could understand. But in this case, I don’t believe it.”
Another of the Mombers’s neighbours, Steve Whitehead, who is also a South African immigrant, told Sky News there was always a chance of serious crime in his home country and the Mombers thought they had escaped it.
“Rika said, ‘At least we’re safe here’,” he said. “The thing we enjoy most as immigrants is the feeling you don’t have to constantly watch over your shoulder. At least in Australia, when something like this happens it makes the news.”
Whitehead described the Mombers as quiet but friendly. – New Zealand Herald, Sapa