All I want is to know why she died, distraught father pleads

One minute she is due for a bath. The next, she is gone with the wind.

And when the baby is found, the nightmare begins. She is dead in an vacant apartment on the same floor where she lived.

Nuru Deen was just two months shy of her second birthday when she was found dead nine days after she went missing.

A few minutes past 6pm on February 8, Faith Mwikali frantically called her husband David Mutua to inform him that she could not find their daughter.

At first he didn’t think much of it and thought she would be found, but half an hour later, Mwikali called, even more desperate. He rushed home to find a flurry of activity, tension and commotion, with neighbours looking for Nuru.

Pictures were put up all over Kitengela and in WhatsApp forums in concerted efforts to find Nuru.

“She had been playing with other children. Her mother breastfed her and then began heating water to bathe her, which is when Nuru ran out of the house. When the water was warm, she went to look for her but did not find her,” says a distraught Mutua.

Mwikali still can’t talk about the incident and looks sadly on as her husband narrates the ordeal. That fateful evening, he locked the gate and searched every apartment that was occupied, but says he did not check the house she was later found in as it was locked.

“We went and reported her missing that same day at Kitengela Police Station,” he says.

After the longest nine days of their lives, Nuru was found.

“Her trousers had been removed and placed on a shoe rack. She had no shoes,” says Mutua.

That caretaker, the custodian of the keys to the building, had found the body in the vacant house on February 17 and reported to the police who came to the scene of crime. It seems that while Nuru was reported missing on February 8, a painter working inside the apartment accessed it the following day and on the two subsequent days without noticing anything.

When Saturday Standard visited the building, tenants were wary, peeping behind curtains. The few we managed to talk to were unwilling to give any information, with some claiming not to have the contacts of the caretaker while others said they had just moved in.

The apartment in which Nuru was found remains locked, but one can clearly see through the windows. The caretaker, Isaac Kimeu, who was mum on the issue. “I can’t give any information because there is an ongoing investigation. I don’t know what they have found so far, so I am also waiting for the investigation to know what is going on. Let’s just wait and see what they will tell us,” Kimeu told Saturday Standard.

According to area OCPD Cyrus Ringera, the doctor who carried out the post-mortem has asserted that he could not identify the cause of death.

“The information that we have is that the report was made to the police station by a caretaker. The report from the parent indicated that she was preparing the child to wash her, but she vanished without her noticing,” Ringera told Saturday Standard.

Visible injuries

The postmortem report said the body had no visible injuries.

Police report say the child may have entered the house after a painter who was working there left it unlocked.

Ringera said the pathologist took more samples to conduct more examination, whose results they are still waiting for.

He posits that after the painter was done, the caretaker may have closed the house, not knowing that the child may have been inside.

The question no one seems able to answer so far is that if Nuru wandered into the house on February 8 and was accidentally locked in, could the painter have carried on his duties without noticing her body? Or was her body brought there after the fact?

All her father wants is to know the truth. “My desire is not for anyone to be caught or killed. All I want to know is why the baby died. Because as a parent it is not easy. I only want to know the truth and I will be satisfied,” says Mutua. The couple has since moved out of the apartment in Kitengela and now live in Athi River.