What did he steal?
This was my first thought when I read that an Eastern Cape principal and two security guards have been arrested in connection with the murder of a 29-year-old victim on school premises.
I did not ask myself this question because I believe thieving deserves murder. Nothing does.
I have just been desensitized.
As a younger journalist I interacted with a reasonable amount of fresh corpses. Even cold ones.
I am less likely to feel shock or distress at scenes of cruelty, of suffering, of death.
The pungent stench of death.
We earn our paychecks differently, and I have walked into a bedroom with bodies of a mother and her three children laying on the bed in order of height, like a stairway to nowhere, bloody and motionless, out in the East Rand.
I have driven towards a kaleidoscope of colourful shrubs on the road and on its side.
On close contact, it was pieces of clothing, of metal, of glass.
There was blood everywhere. It was body parts.
I remember a witness - whom I interviewed - who identified his friend by a shoe when emergency personnel picked up a foot on the ground from the body parts.
There fourteen people died in a horror head-on collision between a Post Office truck and a taxi, out in the West Rand.
There was a loud crash. Screams, a shattering sound of glass scattering everywhere, and passengers were catapulted from the taxi.
On the road, the minibus lay split in half. Its roof ripped off.
The driver’s door was wedged into the grille of the truck.
You can imagine he was in two parts.
I have seen this. This is how a man is served from the abdomen.
My first thought of 29-year-old Bulelani Nocuze’s killing came after I had imagined all the ruthlessness that must have accompanied his demise.
At this point the brutal discription of his murder is a comonality.
There isn't too much new about a body soaking in a pool of its own blood,
like Nocuze was found lying face down between containers in a locked storeroom at Smuts Ndamase High School in the Nkanga-Mbhobheleni village in Libode on August 23.
Hands bound behind his back. Beaten with blunt objects and sticks.
Could it also be that with 40 000 people in South Africa expected to die from coronavirus by November, we have perhaps been desensitized of death?
How would we not if headlines on a weekly read;
Woman, 22, found with multiple stab wounds in boyfriend's home.
Soweto family pained by murder of grandmother and grandchildren, suspect 'on the run'.
Limpopo schoolgirl, 17, stabbed several times, found in a pool of blood?
There isn't too much new about a body in a pool of its own blood.
But such images were never meant to be a normality for school children.
Worse those whose safe space is marred by death, and their principal and two security guards implicated.
Let's pray for Nocuze. Let's pray for the children.
May they never become desensitized, at least not yet.