Woman shot dead after celebrating divorce

Boitumelo Mafura drank wine with her sister as she celebrated the end of a painful divorce. Hours later she was dead.

Mafura was in high spirits on Saturday when she left the home of her sister, Edna Mamonyane, a Joburg Metro Police Department spokesperson, after a dinner party. Less than 20 minutes later Mamonyane received a call informing her that Mafura had been ambushed on arrival at her Rosettenville home by an unknown gunman who shot her dead and fled with nothing. He jumped into an awaiting red VW Microbus.

Mamonyane rushed to the scene and saw her sister lying lifeless in a pool of blood next to her car. Her possessions were untouched. "If someone wanted to rob her, all her belongings would have been taken," Mamonyane said.

Moments after the gunman had fled, a neighbour rushed to the house, hoping to get Mafura to hospital, but the mother-of-three was dead.

Mafura's daughter Cecilia witnessed the shooting. When she heard her mother's car, she opened the door, but the gunman opened fire as she stepped out. "When I heard the gunshots I shut the door. I screamed, alerting people in the house about the shooting. I opened the door again and the gunman was gone and mom was lying on the ground."

Mamonyane said Mafura was excited because her divorce had been finalised on Thursday. "I feel like there is a load that has been offloaded," Mafura had told Mamonyane.

The 45-year-old brought wine and said to Mamonyane: "Give me a nice glass. Not just any glass; you know I love myself. I don't drink in anything. I don't compromise."

She told Mamonyane that she had had a meeting with her former husband. The two had been married in community of property. "She told me she wanted nothing from her husband expect the house," Mamonyane said. She also wanted him to contribute towards their 10-year-old daughter Lesego's school fees.

Mamonyane said Mafura had a feeling that someone was going to kill her.

"For a year now she has been talking about this. She said that if anything happened to her I must make sure that the funeral service is not conducted from her house. She knew she was going to be killed but she refused to put her life on hold."

Mamonyane yesterday said no one had been arrested.

When Mafura's friends advised her to move out of the house, she said: "Why must I run away? Wherever I go, if someone out there wants to kill me, I will die."

• This article was originally published on page 2 of The Star on July 13, 2009