Nurse shot dead by patient at Chiromo Hospital

Faustine Mwadilo the nurse at Chiromo Lane Medical Centre shot dead by a patient. [Courtesy]

A nurse was on Wednesday night shot dead by a patient he was attending to.

Faustine Mwadilo, 43, was attending to a regular patient at Chiromo Lane Medical Centre at around 7pm when he was shot in the head as he tried to convince the patient, who is suspected to be mentally ill, to surrender his gun.

“I was informed that the patient had surrendered the gun without informing them that it was loaded. So when Mwadilo handed it back to him to unload, he used it to shoot him in the left eye. It is impossible to tell why,” Doreen Akinyi, Mr Mwadilo’s widow, told The Standard.

The mother of two said her husband left their house at around 11.30am for the afternoon shift at the hospital.

“I called him at around 6pm and we spoke majorly about how his day went. He told me all was well and that he was preparing to leave in the next hour,” she said.

Ms Akinyi said she was informed about her husband’s death by her sisters-in-law and his colleagues, who visited their home at around 1am.

“I had tried calling him several times in vain and assumed he was busy at the hospital and would call back. I didn’t sleep until my in-laws came,” she said.

According to Mwadilo’s colleague, Kevin Muringe, the nurse was in the room with the patient as he prepared to relieve him for the night shift.

Muringe said he had reported at work at about 7.30pm for the night shift.

While he was in the changing room, he heard a gunshot and rushed out to see what was happening.

“At the nurse’s office, I found the patient shouting for help and Mwadilo lying in a pool of blood with a gun wound in the head and a gun on top of the table,” he said.

Muringe reported the matter to Parklands Police Station. He said the patient was seated in a chair, hands on his head when police arrived.

According to police reports, the patient, who is now in police custody, is a licensed gun holder.

However, there are questions about how a patient suspected to be mentally unwell is allowed to own a gun.