Missing men: (From left) David Mutua, Michael Njuguna Gatonye and Vincent Oluoch.
In Mukuru slums of Nairobi, the air is heavy with whispers, fear, and questions that have no answers. Its men are vanishing quietly.
In a chilling pattern, men are disappearing as if they have stepped out for a moment— their phones left behind, doors locked, and their families left shattered.
As worrisome as it is, Vincent Oluoch, David Mutua, and Michael Njuguna Gatonye all walked the familiar streets of Mukuru.
But these are the same streets from which they disappeared. No one saw them leave. No one saw them taken.
They simply stepped into the night on different dates never to return. Their families have been left wondering why so many unsettling coincidences surround these disappearances. They wait, unsure who the darkness will claim next.
Around 8pm on January 19, Vincent, 27, kissed his one-month-old baby goodbye, pulled on his favourite hoodie, slipped into open shoes, and stepped out of the single room he shared with his wife. He didn’t carry his phone. He left it charging.
“It was like any other day,” his wife, Saisa Napsinaka, recalls, her voice shaking. “He didn’t say much — he never did. I thought he’d gone to watch football nearby. He loved football.”
But Vincent never came back. The gate he walked through became a threshold he never crossed again. His wife waited, the food on the stove turning cold while their baby cried softly in the background. The hours turned to days, then weeks.
“He was soft spoken and kept things to himself,” Napsinaka says, tears running down her cheeks. “He didn’t seem troubled. He wasn’t running from anything.”
The emptiness in their home is deafening now. The mother clutches her baby tightly as she stares at the door, knowing it will never open for her husband again. The neighbors wonder who might vanish next.
Like Napsinaka, Milka Wairimu’s life turned upside down last Thursday (February 6) evening. Her husband, Njuguna, asked for warm water to bathe after the day’s chores, just as he always did.
At around midnight, he sat in the living room, doing transactions on his mobile phone, while Milka went to put their two-year-old daughter to sleep.
“I left him there. We run a small shop, and he was paying for the day’s supplies as he charged his phone,” she explains.
But when Milka returned to the living room, he was gone. His phone was still charging, the door locked, and the keys hung in their usual place. She couldn’t comprehend what had happened.
“I noticed he had completed the payment for the goods,” Milka says. “But he was nowhere to be found.”
The following morning, her routine was disrupted. Her husband always took their older child to school, but now Milka was left juggling everything alone.
She alerted Njuguna’s brothers and parents, and a search began, but days have turned into a nightmare with no trace of him.
“I haven’t eaten properly or slept since he disappeared,” Milka says, her voice breaking. The couple had been married for eight years.
Efforts to find him, alive or dead, have been fruitless. The family reported the disappearance to South B Police Station under OB 16/07/02/2025.
Then, there’s Deborah Mwikali Kaloki. The 50-year-old’s pain of her son’s disappearance is equally unbearable. Her 19-year-old son, David Mutua Ndambuki, vanished on November 2, 2024, and has not been seen since.
“My son is normally so jovial,” she says, her voice filled with anguish. David, who lives with autism, left their home in Mukuru Kayaba and never returned.
Even more troubling is the fact that authorities in the area are not aware of this petrifying trend with Makadara Sub County Criminal Investigations Officer, Martin Korongo telling the Nation: “I have not been briefed by my officers.”
But now, the shocked neighbourhood’s fear has become a constant companion. Each family wonders: Who will be next?
