S. Africa Teen on Trial in O.C. Student’s Death

A teen-ager charged with the murder of Orange County exchange student Amy Biehl went on trial this week, seven months after three other youths received prison terms for killing her.

The prosecution said that Ntombeko Peni, 19, had “stabbed, kicked, jumped on or stoned” Biehl to death in the Guguletu black township on Cape Town’s outskirts.

Biehl, a 26-year-old white Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach, was on the last day of a 10-month research fellowship to South Africa when she was attacked in her car, stoned and stabbed by black youths yelling racial slurs while she was driving friends home to the township on Aug. 25, 1993.

A Supreme Court judge last October sentenced three youths each to 18 years in prison for murdering Biehl.

Peni was arrested last year in connection with the killing. He has been free on $67 bail granted by a magistrate without state opposition.

Constable Leon Rhodes told the court Monday he was the first policeman to arrive at the scene and found a badly injured Biehl being supported by three friends who had been in the car with her.

“She had head injuries and all her clothes were covered with blood. And she was not responding when I tried to give treatment to her,” Rhodes said, adding that she died soon afterward.

Rhodes said a woman came to the police station later that day and gave him the names and addresses of the alleged attackers.

“She gave me four names, one of which was ‘Easy’ and the other one Ntombeko,” he said.

One of the three convicted of the murder was Mzikhona (Easy) Nofemela, also 19.

The trial continues today.