Family in Nyeri cries for justice after murder of four-year-old girl

The soil on the grave of Sylvia Wanjiru at her grandparents’ farm in Chinga, Nyeri County is still freshly piled and the flowers on the wreaths are just beginning to wilt.

Her family can only hope that she is resting in peace, but for them, there is no finding peace yet.

At only four years old, they feel she was taken away from them too young and too soon, especially because Sylvia was murdered in cold blood.

But it is the brutality meted on her that has left everyone in shock.

She was abducted from her home, defiled, stabbed multiple times and beaten to death before being dumped in a river.

Now the questions that linger on her family's mind are who tortured the innocent baby to death and why.

“Just looking at the kind of suffering that child underwent you just wonder what kind of animal would be capable of such an act. She was only a baby,” Ms Alice Wangeci, the grandmother told the Nation.

Sylvia, the only child of Grace Wagathu, was a bubbly shy child, oblivious of the horrors of the world she lived in.

Disappeared

On October 31 she was playing outside with other children but sometime in the afternoon she mysteriously disappeared.

“I had gone to work and left her in the care of my sister. I was told that she had been playing with other children just outside our house. Nobody seems to know how she disappeared,” Ms Wagathu said.

Initially, the family suspected that she could have wandered off into the tea bushes in the surrounding farms and mounted a search for her around Kianwe village.

“We searched every inch of the farms around but she was nowhere. I could not sleep knowing my child was out there at night,” she said.

Two weeks search

Anxiety grew among the family members as the search pushed on for two weeks each day seeming longer than the previous. On November 11, their worst fears were confirmed.

Locals involved in the search stumbled upon a pair of trousers and sandals the child had been wearing on the day she disappeared. The clothes were found on the banks of River Chinga. The search now extended into the river.

The partially decomposed half-naked body of the child was found floating in the river about four kilometres from where the clothes were found.

The horrors of how she met her death were, however, revealed the end of a post-mortem on her body.

Post-mortem

A post-mortem report seen by the Nation reveals the senseless brutality meted out on the once bubbly child, leading to her death.

In fact, the medical examiner who conducted the post-mortem could not isolate a single cause of death, and instead listed the multiple injuries she suffered which could have killed her.

The examination conducted at Mukurwe-ini Sub-County Hospital mortuary shows that the child was sexually assaulted, stabbed multiple times and beaten up severely using both blunt and sharp objects.

She suffered a broken arm, four broken ribs and a fractured skull. She had also been stabbed three times.

The medical examiner concluded that Sylvia died from “severe head, chest abdominal and genital injuries secondary to sharp and blunt trauma”.

“Not even an animal is capable of doing that on a child. She was just an innocent baby. And whatever she might have done is not worth the amount of torture she went through. It angers and pains me every time I think about it,” Ms Wangeci said.

At this point, neither detectives nor police have been able to unravel the mystery surrounding the child’s disappearance.

Parents separated

According to her mother, Sylvia was too shy around new people to accept to leave home alone or with unfamiliar faces. This is particularly so as she had been living at the Kianwe home for only three months after her parents separated.

“We had marital issues with my husband and we separated three months ago so I came back home. I suspect that whoever took her drugged her because nobody saw or heard anything,” Ms Wagathu said.

The family says that they cannot point out any known motive that could have triggered the gruesome murder, adding that they are relying on the police to unearth the truth and, hopefully, they will get the much needed closure.

“We have never heard of such a heinous crime in this area before and cannot think of any reason why anybody would want to harm a child in such a beastly manner,” the girl’s grandmother said.

Nyeri South Police Commander Serah Koki told the Nation that the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) is investigating the brutal murder but no arrests have been made yet.

However, the Nation has learnt that detectives have several times visited the home and scenes where the killing is believed to have been committed.

No arrests yet

“We have not arrested a suspect yet but investigations are ongoing. The problem we have with people around here is that they are not so open to giving police information,” the police boss said.

Sylvia was buried at her grandparents’ home in Chinga, Othaya on Monday last week.

In just one month, six children have been killed in Nyeri alone in separate incidents. While the cases are isolated, each has an eerie similarity in that all the children had been reported missing prior to their bodies being found dumped.

Detectives have so far made little progress in solving most of the cases with the motives remaining a mysterious puzzle.

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