The man (38) whose identity cannot be made public in order to protect his child, pleaded not guilty to charges of child abuse and assault.<\/p>\n
The victim\u2019s 17 year-old sister testified how she saw her brother being picked up and \u201chit against the wall\u201d by his father. In a statement she said \u201cIt is his son. I don\u2019t know why he would hit him against a wall.\u201d<\/p>\n
The girl picked up her brother from the floor after the incident and took him outside the house to try and calm him.<\/p>\n
He was later taken to the Middelburg Hospital where a doctor found that his femur (the bone in his thigh) was broken.<\/p>\n
The mother of the boy testified that she called the father to her house to seek assistance because he was sick.<\/p>\n
Her statement reads that the father became agitated because she bothered him with the child\u2019s illness.<\/p>\n
She also claimed that the man has stabbed her with a knife on two different occasions in 2012.<\/p>\n
The man was also declared unfit to carry a firearm during sentencing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A father from Mhluzi in Middelburg has been sentenced to 2 000 hours periodical jail time after he was found guilty of breaking his seven month-old baby\u2019s leg by throwing the infant against a wall, and for chasing after the mother with a knife. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2844,"featured_media":65915,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"hasGravity":false,"cxt_article_byline":"Jana Boshoff","cxt_disable_google_ads":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news-headlines"],"category_labels":{"Category":"News","SubCategory":"Local news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}