A family from Delft has finally found peace after discovering their missing mentally-ill relative in the Tygerberg Hospital Mortuary after nearly a year.
Deon Johnson, 41, disappeared without a trace from his Leiden home on 31 March 2023, wearing a red T-shirt.
Following Johnson’s disappearance, his family looked everywhere for him for nearly a year, but they were unable to locate the father of one.
They also pursued a number of leads and searched for him at multiple locations before finding his body in the Tygerberg Hospital Mortuary last week.
His sister, Anneline Abrahams, claims they were told that her brother’s body had been there since March of last year.
Abrahams says: “Forensics came to my mother to inform her that his body had been in the morgue since last March.”
Johnson’s discovery came as a huge shock to his family who claimed that they had previously visited the mortuary and found nothing.
Abrahams explains: “We have been everywhere already. How can they let us know after almost a year after we went to go look for him as an unknown at the mortuary?”
Police spokesperson Captain FC van Wyk on Monday could not verify it was Johnson’s body.
Abrahams, however, says the family was devastated by the news, but are now at peace, adding: “I can only give honour and praise to the Lord that my brother was found after almost a year of searching.”
Department of Health and Wellness spokesperson Megan Davids said Johnson was received at the Tygerberg Forensic Pathology Services facility as an unknown person on March 28, 2023.
“The FPS team engaged the Saps to help with the identification and tracing of family members. Regrettably, despite several subsequent attempts, he remained unidentified. Undeterred, FPS then sought assistance from the Victim Identification Centre to facilitate a comparison of the fingerprints against the Home Affairs database in Pretoria,” she explained.
According to Davids, on March 6, 2024, FPS received the results of the fingerprint analysis and started the process of locating Johnson’s family.
“The process was concluded on March 8, 2024, when the Tygerberg FPS team was able to make contact with family and share the devastating news,” she said.
“In the case of Mr Johnson, this closure might have taken longer than what the family would have hoped for and is sadly, not the result they were hoping for.”
byron.lukas@inl.co.za