Dissecting a deadly Cape Town shooting — questions emerge about 28s gangsters, cops and ‘informants’

9 Feb 2025

A fatal shooting in the Mother City a few months ago has sparked questions about gang and cop suspicions, revealing a complex network of criminal activity. Meanwhile, violence across the city persists.

In the early hours of 24 November 2024, the body of Chadwin Koopman was found with gunshot wounds in a street in a Cape Town suburb.

His mother, Benita Koopman, heard from her brother that her 27-year-old son had been murdered – information about his killing had already been posted on Facebook.

Now Koopman is left with more questions than answers about what led to her son’s death and his body being found in Forest Village in the Eerste River area.

“I’m hurt, confused, angry, clueless, because no one can say what happened,” she said this week.

Webs of crime

Chadwin, based on social media posts, enjoyed playing rugby.

In February 2020, he appears to have attended the funeral or memorial of Corné Brown, who was fatally shot that month, reportedly while at a music festival in the Western Cape town of Ceres.

Brown was the son of Hampshire “Hempies” Brown, who was murdered in a shooting in the Eerste River area in February 2018.

As for Chadwin, at the time of his murder he was facing accusations that he had been involved in the fatal shooting of another man earlier in 2024.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGJQ2DYAgjw

According to Koopman, suspicions also did the rounds that Chadwin may have been slipping – or was about to give – information to police, and she had heard he may have been taking the rap, in terms of accusations he faced, for someone else.

Different theories, from other quarters, were that Chadwin was killed in retaliation for the murder he was accused of.

Koopman has not yet pieced together what exactly led to his shooting.

Vigilante attack and cop station murder

And the gritty reality underpinning it is that Chadwin’s killing is one of hundreds carried out over several months in the Western Cape, which is South Africa’s gangsterism capital where related violence is rife.

His killing forms part of a relentlessly increasing murder toll. While some cases contributing to that tally are solved and result in court cases, several remain shrouded in suspicions and questions.

Violence, meanwhile, persists around Cape Town.

Read more: South Africa’s gang capital and its murderous matrix

On 4 February police announced that the bodies of three people had been found in Delft South. They had been shot and set alight in an apparent vigilante attack.

Although an arrest was made, the motive for that was not immediately clear.

A few days earlier, on 30 January, suspected Junky Funky Kids gang leader Ashley Phillips was shot outside the Brackenfell police station, where he was apparently signing documents relating to his parole.

His murder sparked fears of retaliatory shootings.

‘Just a lot of questions’

In Chadwin’s case, he spent the last few months of his life living in Kleinvlei, parts of which are known gang strongholds. The 28s is one of the gangs operating there.

A Western Cape High Court judge previously flagged Kleinvlei, saying certain police officers based at the station there may have been working with 28s gangsters.

Matters like that have weighed on Koopman, sparking more questions about her son’s killing. She is not even sure if Chadwin was murdered where his body was found, or if it was dumped there.

Read more: Gangstas’ Paradise – how the ‘bullet rule’ of gangsters is strangling the life out of SA’s Mother City

“I feel my son has been taken away from us in the prime of his life and only because he wanted to do the right thing,” Koopman said, referring to the theory about him passing on information to perhaps help the police in tackling crime.

“I wonder so many times what went through his head. Did he call out for me? He didn’t deserve to be dump[ed] like trash in the middle of the road.

“He didn’t live a life like that. He was always concerned about everyone [except] himself. [There are] just a lot of questions but no one is willing to talk.”

‘Unknown suspects’

Koopman hoped a police investigation would get to the bottom of what truly led to her son’s killing.

About two weeks ago Western Cape police spokesperson, Warrant Officer Joseph Swartbooi, confirmed to Daily Maverick that the circumstances of Chadwin’s murder were “still under investigation”.

He said Kleinvlei police officers responded to a complaint on 24 November 2024.

Read more: ‘Private militias’ warning after Cape Town taxi shootout

“Upon arrival at the crime scene in Venezuela Street in Forest Village at about 01:55, they found the body of a… man who sustained gunshot wounds,” Swartbooi said.

“The unknown suspects who fled the scene are yet to be arrested. The motive for this attack is the subject of [a] police investigation. Kleinvlei police are investigating a murder.”

This is where matters bleed into more murk.

Landmark judgment

In October 2022, Judge Daniel Thulare delivered a landmark judgment in the Western Cape High Court.

Some of the criminal charges in that case related to the 2018 murder of Hampshire Brown, whose son was shot dead two years later in 2020 (and whose memorial or funeral Chadwin had attended).

In the judgment, Thulare said evidence suggested that 28s gangsters may have gained access to the Western Cape police’s senior management and crime-fighting plans.

His judgment had also referenced the Mobsters, a faction of the 28s, as well as the Kleinvlei police.

Read more: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels – Untangling the Judge Thulare judgment warning of cop collusion with gangsters

Daily Maverick previously reported that an initial police project was run against the Mobsters in the run-up to 2016.

During that project already, certain cops, who were not named in court because they were not criminally charged, were flagged as working with the gang.

Thulare’s judgment alleged “[they] were working at Kleinvlei and were on the payroll of the Mobsters gang”.

State witnesses killed

Three of nine individuals who became witnesses for the State, thereby possibly indemnifying themselves from prosecution, were killed while the first police project was running. That was because the Mobsters knew they had made statements to police.

“The gang called them traitors and scavengers,” Thulare’s judgment said.

“They were killed even before the cases were enrolled.”

Read more: Cape Town’s cop-gang collusion case is still with police watchdog as mass shootings persist

In November 2024, the month in which Chadwin was murdered, Daily Maverick reported that the Independent Police Investigative Directorate was still looking into the assertions in Thulare’s judgment.

While the contents of it may have nothing to do with Chadwin’s killing, they contribute to understanding the broader criminal landscape in which his murder occurred.

It also points to why, regardless of the motive for Chadwin’s murder or what he was accused of, Koopman may be grappling to make sense of the various theories around his killing. DM

Caryn Dolley’s explosive new book, Man Alone: Mandela’s Top Cop – Exposing South Africa’s Ceaseless Sabotage, is now available in bookstores and at the Daily Maverick Shop.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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