Moqadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he’d left his home on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, for his job as a security guard, he’d had to turn around twice, having forgotten first his watch and then his cigarettes. He had reason to be nervous.
His supervisor had assigned him to join a squad protecting an electrical substation where, just two days earlier, four other guards had been stripped naked and beaten with pipes by gun-wielding thieves. Now, on this day in May of 2021, Mokoena and a fellow guard were at that substation, peering tensely through their truck’s windshield as a group of armed men approached. Mokoena pulled out his phone and called his wife, the mother of their 1-year-old daughter.
He told her about the gang coming toward him. “I’m feeling scared,” he said. He didn’t have a gun himself.
“I think they are the same ones who attacked our colleagues.” “Call your supervisor!” she told him. Minutes later, the men opened fire with at least one automatic weapon.
Mokoena’s partner jumped out of the vehicle but was cut down by bullets. A third nearby guard dove for cover, shot back at the thieves, then ran for help. When he returned with the supervisor, they found Mokoena and his partner dead.
Police later said the criminals made off with about $1,600 worth of copper cable. “We face these dangers every day,” the surviving guard later told a local journalist. “You don’t know if you’ll return home when you leav.