MARK RICHARD SPARG
And we also found that people that we thought we could trust, we could no longer trust, because you could judge by a person's attitude towards you.  Anyway, towards the end of  November in 1993, we received word through our guard who worked in the shop and now he's job was to assist us with theft and all the necessary things that, the normal things that a guard would be expected to do and he came along and said, look he must leave because he's been threatened with his life.  Now at that, by that time I had opened what they called The Nochga Flats Store.  They were about 4 kilometers apart.  That was really near the heart of the scheme, the second shop.  So, I went over to the, to the Nochga Flats Store with the intention of closing it immediately, because I couldn't control 2 shops if a Toi Toi arrived on my door and at the time, I said to my customers, look I didn't know what's going on but I must close this shop.  I have to ask you to leave, but I believe that some of my staff could enlighten me as to what's going on here, because I believe that some of my staff are being intimidated to try and make my shops unrunable, if I can use that word and I had an argument with one of my staff members and he said well look he would see me later.  He knows my security, so I said well it's a free country, you know, if you come to see me later and if you're bearing arms, take the consequences.  So, needless to say I went back to the main shop and about an hour later I'd sent my wife into the house.  An hour later  3 gentlemen walked into my  shop  one of
them being one  of my staff members,  whose name is  David.          I can't remember his surname and they started telling my customers to leave the shop and at the same time David moved to the left, away from the 2 gentlemen with jackets on and he said to me well you know, you draw your 9mm.  Now unbeknown to David I had also purchased a shotgun which, it's one of these shotguns that has a barrel that holds about 12 shots in it.
So, I pulled this out and of  course the gentlemen that came in were expecting me to pull out a 9mm and I suspect they were carrying automatic weapons.  So, what the long and the short of it was that I put shot into the wall because I didn't want to kill anybody.  I have no intention of doing that, ever in my life and these gentlemen left and I closed the shop and I went over to the scheme.  They were busy having a meeting and I informed the people what had happened and I said under these circumstances I must leave Nochga.
So, to cut a long story short, we didn't know who was behind all this sort of thing and we actually left.  We were asked to stay at the Manager's house for an hour or so while they could try and find these people, the local chaps and they never found them and we decided when it was getting dark that we would leave.  I actually went through Elliot and all the way round because I didn't know what would have been waiting for us on the road and we were still very puzzled as to all this business.  I mean, lets face it, that's certainly no way to treat people that are trying to do a service in your Community.