Babita Deokaran had built a career in the civil service as an uncompromising figure when it came to the rules - and would not stay quiet when she found evidence that public money had been misspent.
In August of 2021, as winter was loosening its grip, she was riddled with bullets on a chilly Johannesburg morning after dropping her teenage daughter at school.
Her only crime was that she knew too much.
Three weeks before she was killed, she reported a flood of suspicious transactions out of Tembisa Hospital, and immediately moved to stop payments and launch an investigation into hundreds of companies she worried were illegitimate.
READ | Silenced: Why Babita Deokaran was murdered
Unbeknownst to her, she had found the first signs of a mammoth extraction network which had tapped into the hospital's budget.
She was killed before she could take her probe any further.
This documentary, which combines exclusive interviews with her daughter and her siblings, never-before-seen home footage and vivid detail of the web of corruption she found, is a tribute to her unwillingness to bow to wrongdoing.
Using a trove of 60 000 Gauteng health department e-mails and the contents of Deokaran's phone allowed News24's investigations team to piece together - in some cases down to the second - the last month of her life, and what would be her final graft investigation.
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Her warnings about Tembisa Hospital were ignored, and her damning report was buried.
The police investigation into her killing has gone cold. Money meant for the sick and dying of Tembisa Hospital was stolen.
Her memory, and the relatives she left behind, have been betrayed. Silenced: Why Babita Deokaran was murdered is a monument to her bravery, and the sacrifice of all whistleblowers who refuse to be cowed.
