Was late Makueni lawyer psychic? His social media timeline implies so

Constable Nancy Njeri did not see the end of her career coming when she stormed lawyer Onesmus Masaku’s rented house two weeks ago.

The machete-wielding law enforcement officer, who is reported to have been filled with rage, attacked the lawyer at his home in Wote town, chopping off one of his hands and severing the other. The lawyer died on Sunday while being treated at the Kenyatta National Hospital.

He died from the injuries he sustained during the attack. Consequently, police in Makueni have detained their colleague.

Makueni County Police boss Joseph Ole Napeiyan said yesterday he had initiated the process of dismissing the police constable ahead of her arraignment on Friday.

“Investigations in this matter are complete. We shall upgrade the charge from grievous harm to murder charge when she is arraigned in court. I have sanctioned her immediate suspension,'' Mr Napeiyan said.

The two are believed to have been estranged lovers. Investigators will be seeking to establish if the police officer was on a revenge mission.

The case has thrown Makueni Police Station into limbo as senior officers frantically attempt to fight claims that they tried to assist in covering-up the matter.

The lawyer, who lost an arm and bled profusely, was rushed to the Kenyatta National Hospital where he died on Sunday morning. His case has added to a growing number of victims of crimes of passion.

"On Saturday, doctors realised the body was retaining fluids and they had to do a dialysis. He was scheduled for a second dialysis on Monday. We suspect that the organs failed because he had bled a lot. We shall pursue the case to ensure that justice is served," the chairman of the South Eastern branch of the Law Society of Kenya (LSK), Mr Julius Mutisya Mutia, told the Nation in an interview.

Two weeks before the assault, the late lawyer Masaku took to social media to celebrate a ruling by High Court Judge George Odunga against gender-based violence which, he noted, blighted many young marriages. He would later die in the hands of a rage-filled partner.

He shared a copy of Mr Odunga’s July 24 ruling in a 2011 case where an Administration Police officer, Anthony Muema Mutisya, set on fire the house of his girlfriend, Mary Nyakio Mwangi, at Mulala in Makueni County. He accused her of philandering.

The judge handed the Administration Police officer the death sentence after finding him guilty of killing his daughter, Quedaline Nduku Muema, in the process.

In May this year, a related incident happened in Buruburu estate in Nairobi. Vigilance Shighi, 21, was arrested after she allegedly stabbed her boyfriend, a staff member at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, to death in a heated disagreement.

In August 2018, Justice Stella Mutuku sentenced Buruburu businessman Erastus Ngura Odhiambo for shooting dead his girlfriend, 27-year-old Linda Irungu in 2014.

Ms Irungu, a mother of one, was shot by 40-year-old Odhiambo after a quarrel outside her house in Waihura court, Buruburu Phase V.

Earlier, in May of the same year, Ruth Wanjiku Kamande, a 24-year-old woman accused of stabbing her boyfriend to death in the same Buruburu estate in 2015, was found guilty of murder.

She is serving a life sentence at the Lang'ata Women Prison.

This growing trend where lovers filled with rage turn against each other got Justice Odunga concerned.

“Young men and women must appreciate that your girlfriend or boyfriend is not your property. He or she has the right to say no at any stage of the relationship and where, according to her, she has seen the light whether before embarking on the journey or in the course of the journey to Damascus, and feels that you are not the rib that was meat for him or her; you must accept the decision and move on, however, painful it might be," advised the judge.

“While one may use the art of persuasion to try to change another’s mind, he or she has no right to resort to violence to quarantine or lock him or her down. Instead, what one can do to avoid harming others through violence is to sanitise oneself from the temptation to cause harm to a person who finds his/her company unwelcome and to keep social distance until such a time that he/she has had their passion temperature normalised or has vaccinated themselves against such temptations,” added the judge.

“Justice Odunga will choke us with wisdom some day,” Mr Masaku exclaimed on his Facebook and Twitter accounts, sparking multiple conversations. That was his last tweet.
Ms Njeri is scheduled to be charged in court on Friday after a Machakos court granted police 14 days to complete investigations. She is detained at her work station.

She told her colleagues the lawyer had invited her to introduce his new girlfriend, and that he had made sexual advances instead when she arrived.

Ms Njeri claimed she turned down the sexual advances but, he insisted, according to a police report on the incident.

"The lawyer grabbed her and started dragging her to his bedroom. This prompted the officer to grab a panga and slash him on both hands before escaping," Makueni Sub-County Police Commander Timothy Maina said in the report.

LSK has, however, faulted the account and instead accused police of trying to cover-up for their colleague.

It is not clear why she had carried with her a big black bag that detectives later established contained an electric water heater, two mobile phones, a small dress wrapped with a piece of used newspaper, and cooking oil in a yellow plastic bottle as she went into the lawyer’s house.

"She tried to escape carrying the black bag but a crowd that had responded to the commotion in the house restrained her," Mr Peterson Luqoqo, who was among those who witnessed the incident, told the Nation in an interview.

“She was rescued by her colleagues who collected a blood-stained machete from the house”.

Mr Maina acknowledged the presence of the bag and the assorted items in a second report on the incident, playing into the hands of Mr Masaku’s colleagues, who believe the attack was planned.