Family anxious over missing kin in Nyahururu county morgue
The Nyahururu County Hospital mortuary was on the spot yesterday after a family that had gone to pick up the body of their kin found it missing.
The family from Ngai Ndeithia village in Leshao Pondo ward, Nyandarua county rejected the body they were given as an “alternative”.The family that had arrived at the morgue early in the morning to pick up the body of 72-year old Raphael Kimani Desajo but were given the wrong body which it declined to take. Racheal Wanjira, the wife of Desajo said that the physical features of her husband failed to match those of the body that was given to them.
Families summoned
Desajo retired last year from Ngai Ndeithia Secondary School where he served as a cook for many years.
The incident saw members of several families who had removed bodies of their kin from the morgue in the last one week summoned to the Nyahururu DCI office in an effort to find out if the missing body could have been buried by one of the families by mistake.
Among those summoned included Munga Wamunyu, who had buried his brother Joseph Ng’ang’a in Mairo Inya, Nyandarua county, a week ago and Joseph Maina, who buried his 80-year-old uncle Kamau Wanyeki in Gatundia village in Laikipia county about a week ago.
The drama was extended to another family in Njabini, Nyandarua county that had taken the body of their kin from the morgue, early Wednesday.
The Njabini family was telephoned by the Nyahururu DCI officers and told to halt the burial and a family member of Desajo was dispatched to check if the body was that of their relative. However, the body was not Desajo’s.
The aggrieved widow rejected attempts by the morgue attendants to coerce them to take the body of another man. “My husband had only one front tooth missing but the body they are giving us is of a man with almost all teeth missing. We cannot accept to bury a body that does not belong to us,” she said.
Management of the Nyahururu County Hospital that runs the facility said that investigations have been launched to identify which family could have picked the wrong body.“We are reaching out to members of seven families that had buried their kin between July 25 and August 3, 2022 to establish if the body that the family has rejected could be theirs,” said an administrator at the facility.
