“I was disappointed when I woke up at midnight to find that we were both alive after taking poison the previous night,” Sharon Wangare, the woman who stabbed her five-year-old son to death before attempting suicide told the police.
Ms Wangare confessed that after dinner on Saturday night (March 16, 2019), she made a concoction of drugs and took it together with her son, Maurice Karanja, because she wanted to die and not leave him behind.
In a statement recorded after the murder and attempted suicide, Ms Wangare said she woke up at some minutes to midnight to find that they were both alive and that she immediately started planning to execute her ‘Plan B’.
She said that she finally decided to take a kitchen knife, stabbed her son four times and then sat there as she waited for his heart to stop. She would then use the same knife to stab herself in an attempted suicide but not before texting her boyfriend to update him and ask him to come for their bodies.
“Jaribu kukuja kwetu ama mazishi utajua maiti iko na mashetani ni mimi,” read the text Ms Wangari had sent him the previous evening.
KNIFE STABBING
It was that text message that compelled John Njuguna to visit Ms Wangare’s house early Sunday morning, where he found the two on the floor.
Mr Njuguna admitted to the police that he knew his girlfriend meant every single word she said and was capable of killing due to her unstable health condition.
“I had spent the entire afternoon with the minor after which I escorted him home,” he told the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) officers.
During the visit to Wangare’s home, Mr Njuguna said, she had asked her son not to accept gifts from him but he insisted on having him take them.
The gifts, he realized after the murder, had been set on fire.
“When I got to the house on Sunday morning, I found the two on the floor. She was holding a blood stained kitchen knife in her left hand but could still move. She still had a pulse,” he told the investigators.
TREATMENT
He further stated that he immediately rushed out and informed the neighbours and with the help of two women, they rushed her to Bahati Sub-county hospital where she was given first aid then later taken to Nakuru Level Five hospital.
An autopsy report by government pathologist Titus Ngulungu indicated that the minor died after a knife pierced through his heart. Police reports indicate that the body of the deceased had been stabbed four times on the chest.
Ms Wangare’s father, Joseph Njoroge, told the police that his daughter, who runs a retail shop at Maili Sita Centre, had been suffering from Epilepsy and that she had been undergoing treatment at a certain Dr Njau’s clinic at Gate House in Nakuru town.
When she was arraigned before a Nakuru Court on Wednesday, clad in Provincial General Hospital’s blue patients’ uniform, Ms Wangare looked calm, with her head up.
The court allowed the police to hold the suspect at the Bahati police station for 10 more days in order to conclude their investigations into the murder.
The case will be mentioned on April 2.