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Mica (J M)

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Identity
Person No.
31893
Service No.
82733874SP
Last Name
First Name
Unknown
Initials
J M
Date of Birth
Unknown
Est. Birth Year
Age at Death
Unknown
Death Record
Date of Death
Cause code
MVA 2,633
Motor vehicle accident
Cause of Death
Died in a Vehicle Accident
Military Service
Branch
Army
Rank
Rifleman
Unit
Unknown
Defence Force
SADF 3,832
South African Defence Force
Location
Awards
Pro Patria Medal
South Africa
Pro Patria Medal warrant, Government Gazette No. 5171 (25 Jun 1976), Rule 5, as amended by GG No. 5575 (3 Jun 1977); discontinued by GG No. 25213 (25 Jul 2003, Schedule corrected by GG No. 26778, 17 Sep 2004) for service on/after 27 Apr 2003. Gazette extracts: https://rohsa.co.za/award.php?id=24
Notes

ref "Die Buffel Struikel" by LJ Bothma

Research notes

Col (rt) Graham du Toit, Last Post, 28 Aug 2026 names this casualty (ServiceNo 82733874SP, died 28 Aug 1986) 'Jose Miguel Mica', age 31 (matches ROH age). ROH record carries the name 'Mica, Seth Lebakeng (J M)' -- note the bracketed initials '(J M)' match 'Jose Miguel' rather than 'Seth Lebakeng', suggesting the FirstName field may have been contaminated from the unrelated ServiceNo-sharing record PersonNumber 31894 ('Michael, Seth Lebakeng (B)', a different death, 15 Oct 1981, already flagged in that record's own citation). Per the same caution applied to 31894, name NOT overwritten -- flagging for manual review rather than guessing.
25 Sep 2026, Unit2 service-branch sweep: the stored Secondary Unit "Army" was CLEARED as a duplicate. It was not a sub-unit, it was a service-branch word repeating what the Branch column already says. Secondary Unit is for sub-units -- a company, a squadron, a commando -- and this record's branch of service is unchanged at "Army".
Database-wide FirstName/Age/Unit contamination sweep, 28 Sep 2026 (John's hypothesis, tested and confirmed on 3 sample groups before running at scale): FirstName 'Seth Lebakeng', Age 31 and Unit '' were forward-filled from PersonNumber 31892 down a contiguous run of 2 records -- this record's own LastName ('Mica'), Initials ('J M'), ServiceNo ('82733874SP') and DateDeath ('1986-08-28') are all genuinely distinct from every other record in the run, confirming a different real person whose FirstName/Age/Unit were simply never captured (source pattern consistent with a SAPS memorial table using rowspan for Name/Age/Province, mis-copied by the scraper onto every row). FirstName, Age and Unit CLEARED; no replacement guessed. CauseDeath NOT touched -- it follows its own, narrower sub-block boundaries within this run and carries real distinguishing information.
CORRECTION, 28 Sep 2026: the earlier note on this record wrongly described Unit as forward-filled/contaminated alongside FirstName and Age. On review, Unit values proved to be common, genuinely correct data shared by many unrelated real people throughout this dataset (e.g. 'Western Cape' alone appears on 195 scattered, unrelated records with 111 distinct surnames) -- Unit was NOT part of this contamination and has been RESTORED from the pre-sweep backup. FirstName and Age remain correctly cleared -- both were 100% correlated across every contaminated run and independently confirmed absent on SAWGP's own record for spot-checked samples.

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