On March 14, 2025 around 4am, a love-struck teenage student in Navakholo, Kakamega County, is reported to have knocked on the door of the house where his girlfriend was spending the night with her younger sister.
The girl, a 16-year-old Form Two student, is said to have returned home a few days prior to that dark Friday morning feeling unwell.
The girl is said to have opened the door and later left with the boy. But at 6am, her grandfather received a distress call from a group of people who were heading out to their farms that they had stumbled on his granddaughter’s lifeless body in a thicket.
“I heard people screaming and my first instinct was that the students had been attacked in school. Suddenly, I saw some women approaching my homestead wailing. Right then I decided to go find out what was happening. Upon reaching the scene, I saw my granddaughter lying on the ground in a pool of blood with two deep cuts on the head,” said the grandparent.
He said upon probing the girl’s sister, with whom the deceased shared a room, the girl mentioned that her sister left the house in the company of the boyfriend.
“I suspect he killed her to get rid of evidence after I reported to his father that he had impregnated my granddaughter,” the old man said.
An aunt of the deceased told Nation.Africa that she had warned her niece on several occasions to stop the love affair but the girl did not heed to her advice.
“I asked her severally to stop sleeping with that boy in her grandfather’s kitchen but she wouldn’t listen. I even confronted the boy and warned him against the affair and he promised to end it,” she said.
“I swear I cannot have peace until the person who brutally murdered my niece is brought to book. I urge the police to conduct a thorough probe into this incident and leave no stone unturned,” she said.
The assistant chief in charge of Namirama Sub-location Steve Nawade said that upon receiving the news of the murder, he visited the boy’s school together with officers from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations and arrested the suspect but they did not find the weapon used to commit the killing.
“We found him in class but there were no signs of blood stains on his clothes. All we were told by his classmates is that he got to school unusually late and proceeded to the kitchen where he asked for water and disappeared behind the building,” said the administrator.
While all this was happening, back in the village tension was building with relatives of the slain girl mobilising themselves for a retaliation.
Moments later, a huge crowd of angry villagers stormed the homestead of the suspect’s parents and set ablaze seven houses. They also destroyed property of unknown value.
“We are continuing to monitor the situation to avert any further distraction to property and loss of life,” said Christopher Kirui, the police commander in charge of Lurambi Sub-county.
Mr Kirui further said the suspect will be arraigned on Monday, March 17 as detectives investigating the case had gathered substantive evidence.
