Family of five butchered in night attack
On Tuesday at around 5pm, Steve Njehu, a mason, completed work at a construction site in Kagongo, Kiambu county, and proceeded to Karura shopping centre to relax after a hard day’s work.
When he returned home, to a house he shared with a co-worker at around 9pm, he noticed that one of the curtains was blood-stained, and the lights were on.
He opened the door and to his horror, the body of his colleague James Kinyanjui, was lying in a pool of blood on a mattress in one of the rooms.
Police were called in and after recording the scene, they were ready to remove the body to the mortuary.
But before they left, they decided to knock at the gate of the adjacent home to find out if the residents had heard any commotion during the fatal attack.
There was no response and the officers concluded the family was deep asleep.
What they did not know was that all the five members of the family in the house had been brutally murdered, probably by the same gang that killed Kinyanjui.
The body of American-based Njoroge Warunge would later be found outside his house with several stab wounds yesterday morning.
He seemed to have been trying to flee when the attackers caught up with him and slashed him to death.
The badly-mutilated bodies of his wife Anne Wanjiku Njoroge, their two children and a nephew, were all discovered in different rooms in the house.
Yesterday, Njehu told People Daily they completed work at around 5pm after which he took a shower and proceeded to Karura.
“I came back at around 9pm and found the door open with the lights on. The first thing I noticed was bloodstains on the curtain.
I proceeded to Kinyanjui’s room and found his body lying in a pool of blood. He was lying on a mattress on the floor. His neck was cut and he had several stab wounds in the chest,” he added.
Kiambu County Commissioner Wilson Wanyanga yesterday appealed to surviving members of the family to cooperate with police to enable them to establish the motive of the shocking killings.
“This is not robbery and indeed they stole nothing. How they got in to massacre the family is still a mystery.”
He, however, warned the public against speculation about the motive of the macabre killings.
“We got information earlier that a mason had been killed and that is the information we had as at this (yesterday) morning,” Wanyaga added.
As late as 8am yesterday, almost 12 hours after the killings, family members and colleagues did not suspect anything.
One of Mrs Njoroge’s colleagues, Diana Wambui, made a call to her at 8.18am yesterday.
She had a congratulatory message from the headmistress of Royal Kids Education Centre following a successful lecture that the slain woman had given to parents on Monday, just a day before her death.
Wambui said Mrs Njoroge was a guest speaker at the school where she addressed participants about parenting skills and the parents were happy.
“When the head teacher called me, I decided to call Mrs Njoroge to pass the message.
However, her phone went unanswered. I decided to deliver the message in person when we meet at Wangige,” she said.
Wambui, the deputy Nursing Services manager at Nyathuna sub-county hospital, said when she arrived at her work place, she found her colleagues wailing.
“I was shocked to learn that my colleagues were mourning the death of the same colleague I was to deliver a congratulatory message to,” said a distraught Wambui.
“I have worked with Wanjiku for the last 10 years and all I can say is that not only did she know her job but also loved it.”
Warunge, the husband, has been living in the US for the last 15 years and came back to Kenya about two weeks ago. The 55-year-old was scheduled to travel back to America next month.
The brutal murder took place just hours after the couple’s three other children left for school.
The first-born is a student at Mt Kenya University while the second one is in Form Four at St Angela Girls School
. The third child is a Form Two student at Ngiriambu Girls School in Kirinyaga county.
The deceased’s elder brother, Allan Kamau Warunge, who shares a fence with the deceased, said they did not hear any commotion on the fateful night.
Kamau said he and his brother had been previously attacked by robbers in November 2016. The thugs shot and injured him but his brother escaped unhurt.
Detectives from the Homicide Unit at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) led by the Unit’s head Martin Nyuguto visited the scene and conducted a forensic examination.
The examination, according to the detectives, involved piecing together any available evidence that can lead to the identification of the suspects and the motive of the killings.
The team arrived at the compound at around 10.30am and left shortly before 6pm.
At around 6.30pm, the bodies were loaded into police vehicles and transferred to the mortuary.
However, after almost six hours of scene examination, the detectives had no establish the motive of the killing.
“According to the preliminary investigations, this is a case of murder most foul,” a senior detective told People Daily.
Other reports indicated that a relative was not happy with a construction that was going on on the family land.
The detective said that the deceased man’s brother-in-law was constructing a house on the family land, something that some family members were not happy about.
They were, however, optimistic the perpetrators would be identified and brought to book. They are expected to visit the scene again this morning for further analysis.
In forensic science, the Locard’s principle holds that the perpetrator of a crime will bring something into the scene and leave with something from it. Both can be used as forensic evidence.
Detectives yesterday looked for any evidence including fingerprints, footprints, blood, DNA, or even hair among other things. “Every contact leaves a trace. Physical evidence cannot be wholly absent,” a detective said.
Among senior officers who visited the scene are the Kiambu County police commander Ali Nuno and his DCI counterpart, head of DCI’s Special Services Unit Pius Gitari, Benard Gicheru the deputy head of operations at the DCI headquarters, Kiambaa OCPD Michael Muchiri, among others.
Police officers who first went to the scene were forced to break into the house where the bodies which were in bad shape were discovered.
