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The late Shirleen’s mother, Pamela Sande in a pensive mood as she holds her daughter’s portrait on January 6, 2026, at her house in the Mathare area in Nairobi.
In the narrow alleys of Mathare, where tin roofs press against each other and survival is measured meal by meal, Pamela Sande is learning how to live without her daughter — and without justice.
Her child, Shirleen Nyangweso, was killed in Dandora, several kilometres away, inside a single-room house occupied by her father, Nelson Omeno.
The girl had travelled from her father’s home, where she had been residing and on December 26, 2025, headed to Mathare to visit her mother.
However, agitated, the father picked her up from there and took her back home, where he allegedly subjected her to a thorough beating. This happened on December 31, 2025.
According to Ms Sande, when her daughter arrived at her Mathare home and saw her mother, she started wailing, saying that she was going through hell on the other side with the father and all she wanted was to live with her.
Police say the child was beaten to death and her body was later dumped at Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital.
Police say Mr Omeno, a carpenter, vanished shortly after the incident and is now the prime suspect in the death. By the time officers came looking for him, he had gone into hiding.
As investigators pursue him, the tragedy has exposed not just a suspected act of filicide (where one parent kills their children with no comprehensible motive), but a long and troubling history of repeated warnings ignored.
Suspect's mother speaks
Omeno’s mother, Ruth Keya, said her heart is heavy with regret.
In an interview in her Dandora home, where she was staying at the time of the incident, she said she had warned her son a day before he picked the girl from her mother’s house.
“I told him not to take that child. I warned him,” Ms Keya said.
Her warning, she believes, may have been the last chance to prevent what followed.
Nelson Omeno’s mother, Ruth Keya Okutoy, weeps during an interview at her son’s house in Dandora, Nairobi, on January 6, 2026. Nelson is alleged to have beaten up his 15-year-old daughter, leading to her death.
According to Ms Keya, her son’s defiance did not begin in adulthood. She traces it back to his childhood in Butere, Kakamega County.
“He became difficult when he was in Class Six. By then, his father was already dead,” she recalled in the interview.
The relationship between mother and son deteriorated so badly that she felt unable to manage him. Fearing that he was slipping beyond her control, she made a difficult decision.
“I sent him to his elder brother in Nairobi,” she said.
That decision marked Omeno’s first step into the city but the arrangement did not last.
“They also differed,” said a relative familiar with the family. “Eventually, he was chased away.”
With no stable home and no formal education to fall back on, Omeno drifted — until a stranger intervened.
The late Shirleen’s mother, Pamela Sande in a pensive mood as she holds her daughter’s portrait on January 6, 2026, at her house in the Mathare area in Nairobi.
A Good Samaritan, relatives say, took him in and trained him in carpentry.
It was a trade that would later sustain him, putting food on his table and earning him a reputation as a strong, hardworking artisan.
But behind that phase of life, family members say was a man whose temper and defiance never truly softened.
Years later, Omeno would establish two separate households.
His first wife, Pamela Sande, now lives in Mathare with three other children in a cramped shanty. The daughter who was killed belonged to her.
Ms Sande’s vulnerability dates back to her teenage years. She says she was a student in Butere when Omeno allegedly lured her out of school and took her to Nairobi — a move that happened against the wishes of his mother.
In Donholm, he lived with another woman, the mother of his two younger children.
When this reporter visited, she was carrying her last-born — a smiling two-year-old boy — unaware, or unwilling, to speak about the tragedy that had unfolded in that same space.
It was inside this house, police say, that the deceased child was beaten.
The late Shirleen’s younger sister, who is alleged to have been burnt by her father Nelson Omeno when she was two years old, pictured on January 6, 2026, at their home in Mathare Nairobi.
After the beating, the child’s body was abandoned at Mama Lucy Kibaki Hospital.
By the time hospital staff alerted authorities, Omeno had disappeared.
A police signal seen by the Nation indicated efforts to trace Omeno are ongoing.
Family members fear that without sustained attention, the case could quietly fade — another entry in Nairobi’s growing list of domestic violence tragedies.
Beyond the manhunt, the case raises painful questions. How did repeated warnings from a parent go unheeded?
How did a history of defiance, displacement and unresolved conflict culminate in the death of a child? And how many vulnerable women and children remain exposed to similar risks, unseen and unprotected?
