KEETMANSHOOP – The parents of 5-year-old Immaneul Hendricks are looking for answers after they discovered the bruised and lifeless body of their toddler in a dam on the farm Gellap Ost, about 10km north of Keetmanshoop.
The parents believe he was killed before he was thrown into the dam. However, according to Crime Investigations Co-ordinator of the Namibian Police Force (Nampol) in the //Karas Region, Deputy Commissioner Rudolf Isaaks, the boy merely drowned. “The boy drowned there are no bruises on his body he just drowned,” said Isaaks, who also asked this reporter not to run the story just yet. Meanwhile, speaking to New Era, the mother of the boy, Anna Hendricks, explained her child was playing with his friends as usual and she only missed him at five in the afternoon when all the other children returned to their houses and he was missing. “I saw the other children running through my yard and when I realized he was not with them I just had this strange feeling that something bad has happened. We started looking around but no one saw him or any stranger during that day. One of the girls told me that a man came to watch them while they were playing but he went away. We looked for my son at the dam several times that day, but he was not in there. On Tuesday morning we woke up again very early to look for him and that is when we found him in the dam at six that morning,” she related.
She also related how his one eye was bleeding and that the bruises on his body convinced them that he was murdered. “I saw blood on his body and his neck was bruised as if he was strangled. There was a dent at the back of his head and the one side of his head was swollen and a scratch on the bridge of his nose and on his one lip. There was also a slight cut mark on his throat, but the rest of his body was fine,” she said. “We told the police he has drowned, but he did not have those bruises when I last saw him. I am leaving everything in their hands I believe they will find the person who killed him, I do not want to point fingers to anyone if we are not hundred percent sure,” said Hendricks. The boy was laid to rest in Keetmanshoop on Saturday.
By Jemima Beukes