A guy out of Zvishavane just got hit with a straight dozen years behind bars, and the whole thing kicked off with a fake taxi ride that turned into a machete robbery. Noah Zhou, jobless, thirty years old, copped a guilty plea in front of Masvingo Regional Magistrate Innocent Bepura, and the sentence landed mid-July.
Zhou's defense basically boiled down to claiming he only wanted the car to haul his stuff around before ditching it, and he tried leaning on the court for mercy by blaming his epilepsy and pointing fingers at his partner in crime for pulling him into it. Bepura wasn't having it, flagging how robbery's spiking across Masvingo lately and stressing that judges gotta hand down sentences that actually scare people straight.
Rewind to mid-June, roughly quarter to one in the morning, and Zhou plus a guy named Terrence, who's still ghosting the law, flagged down thirty-six-year-old cabbie Tafadzwa Mutero outside a nightclub in Mucheke acting like normal fares. They booked a short trip for four bucks, then had Mutero looping through backroads he didn't know before ordering him to pull over, kill the engine, and hand the keys across at machete point. Mutero caught a blade strike to the back, got robbed of cash, his phone, and even his shoes, then got beaten again before Zhou peeled off in the Toyota Probox.
Cops eventually tracked the car down at Mashava Tollgate, found some other guy driving it who said he'd rented it off Zhou, who'd apparently been posing as a small-scale miner. Detectives caught up with Zhou himself in Zvishavane and he walked them through the crime scene right after. Total damage came to over eight grand, and cops clawed back most of it.
Zhou's defense basically boiled down to claiming he only wanted the car to haul his stuff around before ditching it, and he tried leaning on the court for mercy by blaming his epilepsy and pointing fingers at his partner in crime for pulling him into it. Bepura wasn't having it, flagging how robbery's spiking across Masvingo lately and stressing that judges gotta hand down sentences that actually scare people straight.
Rewind to mid-June, roughly quarter to one in the morning, and Zhou plus a guy named Terrence, who's still ghosting the law, flagged down thirty-six-year-old cabbie Tafadzwa Mutero outside a nightclub in Mucheke acting like normal fares. They booked a short trip for four bucks, then had Mutero looping through backroads he didn't know before ordering him to pull over, kill the engine, and hand the keys across at machete point. Mutero caught a blade strike to the back, got robbed of cash, his phone, and even his shoes, then got beaten again before Zhou peeled off in the Toyota Probox.
Cops eventually tracked the car down at Mashava Tollgate, found some other guy driving it who said he'd rented it off Zhou, who'd apparently been posing as a small-scale miner. Detectives caught up with Zhou himself in Zvishavane and he walked them through the crime scene right after. Total damage came to over eight grand, and cops clawed back most of it.
