Murder at home: When your flesh and blood turns killer

There is a problem at home.

When four members of the Warunge family and a casual labourer were butchered, allegedly by the household’s first-born son, they joined a long list of individuals who have lost their lives in their homes this year, the one place they are supposed to be safest.

Police statist ics show that at least 10 people have died in the first 13 days of 2021 in familicide — murder of family members — and the trend has become a concern for police, psychologists and Kenyans.

From the stranger than fiction Warunge family murders to the killing of 65-year-old Joseph Njuguna Mbeca on Sunday night and the deaths of five family members believed to have inhaled carbon monoxide in Githurai on January 2, stress levels amongst individuals have reached new highs that are screaming for attention.

Exactly seven days after the tragedy in the Warunge household, a man in Laikipia set himself and his two daughters on fire in their Tigithi Location home.

Neither 42-year-old Joseph Mburu nor his young daughters survived the incident. He allegedly set the house on fire after a quarrel with his wife, Amina Mburu, who managed to escape with serious burn injuries.

And still in Nairobi, police are seeking to charge Nigerian national Christian Mwambay Kadima over the murder of 34-year-old lawyer Elizabeth Koki Musyoki in Syokimau, Machakos County.

Murder, rape, defilement and assault have rocked homes, and they have now become a trend that even the best policing cannot easily combat as crime moves to the one place nearly out of reach to security officers.

Experts have now linked the spiralling wave of crime in the home to social and economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Homicide cases

Riziki Ahmed, a clinical psychologist and family therapist based in Nairobi, notes that the homicide cases started rising when the pandemic struck the country last year.

The restrictions announced by the government as a way to curb the spread of the disease were unexpected and as Kenyans adapted to the new normal, stress levels, anxiety, idleness and some state of hopelessness set in as the fear of contracting the virus grew.

“We are not used to being holed up together and the uncertainty of what would happen the next day heightened people’s nerves so people became highly irritable because they are not sure what the minister will say tomorrow, the fear of the President locking up more places and the fear of getting infected and getting into isolation also led to some anxiety,” she notes.

Others, according to Dr Ahmed, were affected by lack of a routine and kind of stopped planning for the future — the effect of which brought out the worst in people and more so those who had pending unresolved issues at home.

The issues became more heightened and those who had no squabbles started having them.

“I think irritability and a sense of hopelessness pushed others to homicide,” she added.

Personality disorder

The psychologist, who has been following the Warunge family murders, says the main suspect’s mannerisms point to some personality disorder.

“He seems to have some anti-social behaviour. Psychopaths are people who look very charming and calm until they commit a crime,” she explains.

“When he says they were talking badly about him, would that be enough trigger one to kill an entire family in normal circumstances? Definitely not. People might say that if he is not normal then how was he able to plan? We are not saying a psychopath is having psychosis, you see people mistake that for personality disorder,” she said, adding that a psychotic person is mentally unstable and may not know what to wear and when the day of the week is, but Nicholas Njoroge did not exhibit any of such traits.

Mental assessment

A mental assessment conducted on him last week established that he is fit to stand trial.

Criminal lawyer Gerald Magani is of the opinion that parents’ focus to provide for their families has pushed some to neglect their parenting roles, forcing children to turn to social media to understand right from wrong.

“The children end up confused because their major source of inspiration is the soap operas, movies and social media without parental guidance. Unless parents go back to the drawing table and seek ways to address some of these gaps, then this situation is likely to persist,” he said.

Dr Ahmed advises Kenyans to develop problem solving skills to help them deal with explosive issues within their families.

Communal approaches to sorting out problems have been killed by urbanisation, leading to situations where families are living without minding each other.

Seek therapists' help

Families are also encouraged to consider seeking therapists to walk them through rough phases.

“We are seeing people letting things simmer then they boil over and when that happens it’s beyond somebody’s knowledge that they are doing the wrong thing.”

Research, she says, shows that watching more violent content makes people less sensitive to violence.

“I can see someone killing another person and fail to be moved because I have watched so much violent content that I have lost that sensitivity,” the psychologist adds.

Security researcher Edward Wanyonyi believes the rise in homicides in families is more of a social problem that requires change in people’s behaviour.

Put stop-gap measures

He adds that Kenyans have become more reactive than proactive and are not putting stop-gap measures to prevent crimes from happening at home.

“In countering violent extremism, we say targeting the most at risk before they are radicalised is key, but in normal crimes we do not do that. We wait till the issue has happened, for example the case of the young man who allegedly killed his family was not something that just happened, it was something he thought through and plotted but perhaps lacked someone to talk to,” says Mr Wanyonyi.

He offers that families should have coping mechanisms in the midst of hardship or challenges and seek ways to detect and alleviate or reduce homicides from happening at home.

“Nowadays people are living in their own worlds even at home. No one bothers about the other person, people are not talking at the dinner tables. Everyone is busy on their phones such that when such a thing happens, no one calls the other one out.”

“The bottomline is, crime is never a solution to whatever problem that one has,” he concludes.

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Additional reporting by Brian Wasuna