TINY Mabaso (30), the mother of the two-year-old boy, was at the shop on 13 July, when her toddler told her he needed the toilet.
Tiny asked the shop assistant she knew to take her son to the toilet.
Instead of taking her son to the toilet, the shop assistant allegedly strangled the toddler and put his body inside a plastic bathtub.
Tiny from Langaville in Tsakane, Ekurhuleni, became worried when her son didn’t come back.
She asked the shop assistant where her son was but she didn’t get a straight answer from him.
Nothing could have prepared Tiny for what she saw when she found her son’s body in the bathtub.
“I touched him but he didn’t move. I called his name but he didn’t respond,” she said.
Tiny said at that moment, she knew her son was gone.
She said the assistant tried to run away but residents moered him and by the time the cops arrived, he was dead.
“I’m still trying to understand what possessed him. That image of seeing my son lying in the bath haunts me,” she said. My son was intelligent and I was training him to use the toilet
She said she knew the shop assistant.
‘Whenever I went to the shop we would chat as I knew his brother,” she said.
The toddler’s aunt said: they were devastated that the innocent child died like this.“We don’t know what he wanted from the child.”
Sergeant Lerato Mngomezulu said they have opened two cases of murder.