Cape Town: Wandi Zitho was five when he was strangled with a rope this April, allegedly by a neighbour in Johannesburg.
He became another dead child, in a country where there are too many.
Around 1,000 children are murdered each year in South Africa, according to official figures.
Yet many more killed children don't make the official numbers, as homicides are not investigated properly, according to Professor Shanaaz Matthews, director of the Children's Institute at the University of Cape Town.
In a 2013 paper, Matthews found that South Africa had a child homicide rate of 5.5 per 100,000.
"And when we compared this to global averages we found that this was more than double the global average of child homicide rate of about 2.4 per 100,000," she said.
Police statistics showed the numbers "have slightly increased" since, she added.
Another young victim was Tazne van Wyk, an eight-year-old whose body was found this February, dumped in a drain near a Cape Town highway.
