Dad’s burnt body still haunts her

Johannesburg - Never, ever again does Louise Okkers want to drive on South Rand Road, where the burnt corpse of her father was found last week.

Okkers lives just down the road from the burnt patch of grass in Moffat Park on which police doused a fire and found the body of 75-year-old Kenneth Warries.

“It’s hard to reconcile that such a kind, gentle man had such a horrific death,” his daughter said on Wednesday, holding a crumpled tissue.

The shock of discovering what happened has yet to wear off. Her doctor said she speaks as if she has removed herself from the situation. It’s the only way she can cope.

Okkers finds it difficult to leave the house now.

When she sees elderly people on the street, she can’t help but think about their vulnerability.

Her father loved the outdoors, loved walking, loved being independent, she said.

He had moved in with her three weeks before the incident and was spoiling his granddaughters with his famous cooking.

Warries had loved his daily walks to the shop to buy a newspaper, cold drink and lottery ticket, and sitting and reading in the park.

He had left that morning of May 13 on his typical route, leaving at home his 19-year-old granddaughter, who was studying. He didn’t return.

When Okkers went to the police to report her father missing, they showed her and her husband Deon a bag with Warries’s house keys and his cellphone.

Okkers’s brother later went to identify the body.

But that’s not what Okkers wants to remember.

She said she wanted people to remember the wonderful person her father was: how he loved her mother; how friends and even the optometrist would beg for some of Warries’s creamed chicken soup; and how he spoke little, but when he did, it was humorous.

Okkers and her husband had at first asked themselves if the death had perhaps been a suicide; if they had missed something.

But knowing that Warries was found barefoot, wearing only his boxers and T-shirt and without his watch or wallet, she said she feared crime might be more likely.

“Just the thought of the body near the backyard…” she said, trailing off.

“I can’t understand how you could be so brutal to someone.”

Warries grew up in Pretoria and moved to Cape Town, then to Joburg, where his daughter grew up and met Deon, who has known Warries for 26 years.

“To me he wasn’t just like a father, he was my father,” Deon said.

Police have not identified the circumstances around the death.

The funeral was held on Saturday.

karen.chen@inl.co.za

The Star