Prosecutor accidentally shot to death in court with piece of evidence.
A freak incident has left the South African legal community in shock after a prominent prosecutor was accidentally shot to death Monday in the middle of a trial — with a gun that was central to the case, authorities said.
The attorney, Addelaid Ferreira-Watt, was prosecuting a home robbery when a loaded shotgun was brought into the courtroom to be entered as evidence. Somehow, as a police officer “was trying to pick up or handle the firearm,” it went off and struck Ferreira-Watt in the left hip, a spokesman for South Africa’s police watchdog agency, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, told The Washington Post.
Ferreira-Watt, 51, was transferred to the hospital but did not survive. Now, the IPID is investigating the case as a culpable homicide, spokesman Sontaga Seisa said. “Whatever the circumstances,” Johan Booysen, former head of KwaZulu-Natal police’s Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, wrote on Twitter, “Some-one will have to account for the death of [Advocate] Adelaide Ferreira-Watt in Umzimkhulu court yesterday.”
Brigadier Jay Naicker, a spokesman for the South African Police Service in KwaZulu-Natal province, told local news radio station 702 that the suspects stole the shotgun from a couple during a 2014 farmhouse robbery in the town of Ixopo, in the KwaZulu-Natal province.
Ferreira-Watt had been a prosecutor for 27 years, the National Prosecuting Authority said in a statement. Just two weeks before she died, her sister, Karin Stander, told You magazine she was considering retiring after years of insisting it wasn’t time. Stander said when the family learned where Ferreira-Watt had been shot they thought she would be able to pull through. Some reports said the shotgun blast severed an artery.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/11/21/south-africa-gun-court-addelaid-ferreira-watt-killed/