Three hours with the dead for mortuary thief

By NICHOLAS ANYUOR

Even in harrowing, teeth gnashing times, when people weep and others faint, a few, ironically, still laugh and enjoy every bit of the moment.

That’s why there was laughter and joy when a senior security officer at a public hospital in Kisumu locked up a petty thief in a mortuary for hours.

The rascal had attempted to rob a mourner of a mobile phone within the precincts of the morgue.

The thief took advantage of the mourning mood at the New Nyanza Provincial Hospital Mortuary after the road accident that claimed 26 lives recently.

But as he soon discovered, anyone or anything can become a neighbour.

He spent hours having chilling conversations with the bodies in the mortuary.

That morning, Kisumu City had been dull, the mood somber, as all roads led to the mortuary, with hundreds milling tearfully into the morgue to identify the bodies of their relatives and friends.

Cleansing

However, as Luo adage has it, lak chogo (a tooth is bony), which is to say that even in sad situations, some people still laugh their teeth out.

So the young man, instead of joining the throng of mourners, was on duty. He had come to steal from the bereaved.

But he received his fair share of the deal and spent more than three hours in the mortuary with dead bodies — an occurrence that no doubt will require cleansing at a cost way beyond the price of the mobile phone he intended to steal.

"He came here with his own intentions. People were crying, many had lost their relatives and he was just happy stealing our phones," fumed Julius Wanyama, one of the mourners.

They say the dead speak no tales, but they must have been outraged when the thief dipped his itchy fingers into the victim’s pocket and pulled out the phone. For the owner of the gadget, even in his moment of grief and perhaps forewarned by spirits, sensed and grabbed the thief’s hand before he could run away.

The commotion attracted more mourners who rushed to the scene to find out what was amiss, with many suspecting a bereaved family member might have fainted.

Roughed up

Tempers flared quickly, outrage mounted and in no time, the angry mourners had roughed him up and were ready to lynch him within the mortuary compound. He would not have required an ambulance to ferry him to the morgue. Fortunately, a senior security officer at the Nyanza Provincial hospital saved him.

"Let us lock him in the mortuary with the dead. How can someone do such a thing here when we are mourning? He is a mad man," he said. Before the crowd could argue, he shoved the suspect into the mortuary and quickly locked the door.

"I didn’t want him to be killed so I saved his life by locking him in the mortuary. I did it to help him. Better mortuary than being killed by the mob!" he said.