Detectives ask Kenyans to help solve rising cases of children killings

As other six-year-olds were clutching at their blankets on a cold night in Mlolongo, Beverly Mumo was writhing in pain on the back of a car as she was being taken to a hospital 20 kilometres away.

At Mater Hospital in South B estate, Nairobi, doctors pronounced the girl dead on arrival.

“She had complained of sudden chest pains,” Mumo’s father Robinson Musyoki would later tell officers at Mlolongo police station where the death was reported on August 24.

Not convinced of Mumo’s cause of death as reported by her father, Mr Musyoki’s estranged wife Naomi Kiamba would go to several police stations seeking justice for her daughter.

After weeks of being shuttled between stations, Ms Kiamba ended up at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) headquarters.

It is on the orders of DCI chief George Kinoti that investigations on Mumo’s death began.

Usually investigations where the cause of death is disputed begin with a postmortem as detectives question those who last came saw the deceased.

“There are abundant scars with imprints. Injuries are on the whole body,” says the postmortem done by doctors Johansen Odour, Edwin Walong, Waithera Mbau and Charles Muturi on September 2.

“Main findings were recent and old injuries distributed on all regions characteristic of physical abuse,” says the report, which showed that the girl had been defiled days before her death.

Ugly custodial dispute

With the new information, detectives set out to find who killed Mumo and why.

In the last three years of her life, Mumo was the centre of an ugly custodial dispute between her parents.

In January, a magistrate’s court issued an arrest warrant against Mr Musyoki

“It is ordered that the minors be taken by a children’s officer from their location since the defendant has refused to hand them over to the plaintiff and is in contempt of the court,” the magistrate’s court said when Mr Musyoki refused to return Mumo and her brother to their mother.

With no evidence on who could have inflicted the injuries on Mumo, the fact that there has been a conflict between her parents is one of the angles being pursued by investigators.

The person who killed the six-year-old is yet to be arrested.

But even as detectives attempt to unravel the puzzle, now in its second month, cases of children dying in mysteriously continue to rise alarmingly.

Kenya’s overall moral fabric continues to be put into question with every mysterious death of its children.

“The homicide department is stretched,” Mr Kinoti told the Sunday Nation, adding that it is a worrying situation.

“We will get to the bottom of every death, whether it is a child or an adult, like we have always done even if it takes months,” he said.

In the absence of reliable data on mysterious child deaths, one can only rely on individual news reports to ascertain the magnitude of the problem.

According to Unicef, approximately 95,000 children are killed worldwide every year.

At least three children are killed by their parents in the United Kingdom every month.

Mysterious deaths

The Sunday Nation has counted at least 25 mysterious deaths of children from various news reports in Kenya in the last four months alone. Strangely, all the cases are of children aged below 10.

While many can be classified as murders, the rest pass as deaths whose cause cannot be pinpointed to a particular reason or having been caused by anyone.

The bodies of two brothers, aged three and a half and two years, were found floating on River Sagana in Mathira West, Nyeri county, on Monday.

Delyan Harrison Wachira and Kian Georgeson Wachira were last seen in the company of their mother Eva Wangui in Marua at the beginning of the month.

“It appears they were thrown in the river. The only suspect remains their mother,” Mathira East deputy police boss Richard Masila said.

Locals say they saw Ms Wangui with the two boys in Githiru, about seven kilometres from her house asking for the shortest route home.

She was found appearing confused with wet clothes outside her parents’ house in the morning.

But as police wait for results of a psychiatrist examination on the woman, Mr Kinoti says the boys  may have drowned as they swam in the river unsupervised.

“It is not just them. Remember the two children from Athi River who were found in a car at a police station. They just wandered from home and locked themselves in the car. It means it was not the first time they were doing it,” he said.

“Because of frustrations, grown-ups no longer care about their children. The society no longer views children as belonging to it.”

The children the DCI head referred to are Alvina Mutheu and Henry Jackton.

Their bodies were found at the Athi River police station in July, three weeks after they were reported as missing.

A postmortem failed to reveal the cause of death since their bodies were at an advanced state of decomposition.

It is still an open case though Mutheu and Jackton’s parents insist that they were killed.

While the deaths of Mutheu, Jackton and the Wachiras can be described as mysterious, those of deaths of Clara Wanjira and Faith Wanjiru are not.

Wanjira was at her mother Mercy Gathoni’s shop in Njambo, Karatina on October 22 when unknown people entered from a back door.

Wanjiru, who was playing outside was around the same time, was asked by some customers to call her aunt.

On gaining access to the shop she found the unknown people strangling her aunt and cousin.

Being the only witness, she was also strangled in the daytime bizarre murder that left Njambo locals in shock.

Though there was no witness to the killings, the first person to be arrested was Ms Gathoni’s former husband who is assisting police with investigations.

While Sunday Nation cannot say if the man was involved in the killing, behavioural scientists say the reason of many murders of children by their parent is desperation.

“Such children are at risk if there was domestic violence in their parents’ relationship before the break-up,” Dr Philomena Ndambuki of Kenyatta University told the Sunday Nation.

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