A teenager has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for murdering 16-year-old schoolgirl Deveney Nel and hiding her body in a storeroom at their school.

The Western Cape High Court in South Africa handed down the sentence on Friday, 17 October 2025, after the 18-year-old – who was 17 at the time of the killing – pleaded guilty to Nel’s murder at Hoerskool Overberg in Caledon in August 2024.

He received an additional 12 months for attempting to defeat the ends of justice, with the sentence to run concurrently.

Deveney Nel poses in undated photo. She was murdered in school storeroom in Caledon, South Africa. Note: Private photo. (newsX)

The court heard that the pair were both part of the school’s first aid team and were on duty during a sporting event when the attack took place.

He told the court that he asked Nel to help him at the netball courts and that they went into the school storeroom together.

There, he said they had sex which he said was consensual and claimed he flew into a rage when she said she was going to tell her boyfriend.

He said he had not known she was in a relationship and that he became angry.

He throttled her until she fell to the ground, took out a knife from his jacket pocket and stabbed her four times – twice in the neck and twice in the chest – aiming for her major arteries.

He then dragged her body to the back of the storeroom and tried to hide it before returning to his duties.

He took her mobile phone and placed it in the back of a bakkie in the school car park to mislead police and staff searching for her.

When Deveney failed to show up for a lift home with the boy’s mother, a search began involving school staff and police.

Her phone was recovered and handed to officers before her body was found in the storeroom.

The teenager later confessed to the killing in the presence of his mother after police questioned him as the last person seen with Deveney.

Deveney’s mother, Lida Nel, said in her victim impact statement that losing her daughter had changed her life forever and described the pain as “the most painful pain that can exist in a parent’s life”.

She said she was dependent on sleeping pills and struggled to function normally since her daughter’s death.

Lida described Deveney as gentle, loving and full of empathy, adding that her younger daughter Jamie had lost “a piece of her past and the future they had imagined together”.

National Prosecuting Authority spokesperson Eric Ntabazalila said the court had imposed the maximum sentence allowed under the law.

Western Cape Director of Public Prosecutions Advocate Nicolette Bell welcomed the ruling and said she hoped it would bring some closure to Deveney’s family.

She said gender-based violence and femicide had no place in society and that prosecutors would continue to pursue such cases vigorously to ensure justice for victims.

The convicted killer, whose identity remains withheld because he was a minor at the time, has also been declared unfit to possess a firearm.

(Mike Leidig / newsX)