Roselyne Akoth Ogongo, the 24-year-old woman whose half body was found at Kware dumpsite, was a social media addict who would stay late into the night browsing through her phone.
Her brother, Emmanuel Ogongo, with whom she lived before going missing, recounted how his younger sister would stay up late chatting with people she knew and even strangers on TikTok.
She was a warm woman with an outgoing personality and was quick to forge relationships with people, her brother said.
He told the Star that Akoth came to Nairobi three months ago after her marriage collapsed.
When she left her husband, she took her three children. When she decided to come to Nairobi to seek a better life, she left the children in the care of her mother, Benta Awuor, in Asembo, Rarieda constituency, in Siaya.
After coming to Nairobi, her brother said, she moved to Rongai where she got a house help job.
“She worked in Rongai briefly as a house help. Her job did not last and she came to my house,” he said.
The brother lives in Kware, Embakasi.
It was during her stay at his place, that he learnt about his sister’s social media addiction.
“She loved social media lot. We would go to bed but she would stay up. You wake up at 2am and still find her giggling as she scrolled through her phone, enjoying the content on TikTok,” he said.
“In fact, if you found her phone offline, just find her social media details like her handles and you would see her online.”
In Kware, he said, Akoth started getting casual jobs at local eateries.
She would go in the morning and come back in the evening but in some days she would not come back.
That is why on June 28 when she did not return home, he was not worried. He thought perhaps “she was with a man and she would be back”.
“Her phone was ringing but no one picked and I felt maybe her boyfriend was keeping her phone away from her just for a moment,” he said.
Days later, the phone went off and he could not see her online. Anxiety kicked in.
“I did not see her online as was the norm. She was a person who would never part ways with WhatsApp, Facebook and Tiktok. But now her phone was off and she was not active on social media. That is when I started worrying about her.”
Emmanuel said he at some point thought perhaps his sister had made her way back to her estranged husband back in the village because the man had also been looking for her.
“I thought she had moved back upcountry to her husband. But he insisted he had not seen or heard from her.”
When the news of Kware body dump broke, as part of his search for his sister, he mustered the courage to go to the City Mortuary.
At the mortuary, Emmanuel explained the physical attributes of his sister and was moved to the slabs where remains extracted from the deserted quarry were kept.
“They showed various body parts and at once I spotted my sister. Her waist downward is not there, only up to her face.”
He remembered the blouse he last saw her wearing and the way she made her hair.
“I told them that was the person I was looking for. Later some of my relatives also came and they confirmed because they knew many more features like her teeth structure and the necklace,” Emmanuel said.
He said he did not know Collins Khalusha, the man police are accusing of killing Akoth and other women.
“I never knew him. I only came to learn about him like everybody else, when police arrested him.”
Courtesy: The Star, Kenya
