The cold-blood murder of 23-year-old college drop-out Rodgers Ochieng, believably by the Kenyan police, is worth reflecting upon. Rodgers was a victim the monstrous Kenyan police. He was shot by a trigger-happy police officer on the evening of June 28th allegedly for defying the dawn to dusk curfew imposed on March 27, 2020 to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
By the time of Rodgers’s shooting, 15 people from across the country had been killed by the police, according to statistics from the Kenya Police reform working group, a number that Kenya’s government disputes.
The group comprises of various civil society organisations that have been working on the issue of extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances. By their count, 103 people were either killed or disappeared by the police between January and August 2020. For context, by the end of 2019, 144 people were dead in similar circumstances.
At 7 am on July 17th, 2021, the skies above Nairobi opened for a brief but intense interval of rain. The days before it and after would be sunny, but on this morning only rain and a dull grey sky would do. On this day, Rodgers would be laid to rest. Slates of rainfall seemed especially heavy at Nairobi’s city mortuary as his younger brother Andrew Otieno dashed between the hearse they had hired and the mortuary’s cold room to talk to a mortuary attendant.
I was standing under a gazebo a short distance away. The rain made it hard for me to hear what Andrew was telling the mortuary attendant, but it was clear that he was upset by his response. I went over to find out what was wrong. “The attendant says he can’t find Rodgers’s body!”
The morgue attendant would repeat the same to me, then make a call to a colleague who had been handling Rodgers’s remains the day before. When I identified myself as a journalist who was interested in following the murder of my peer, the attendant, now joined by an older Rodgers’s body had been stored in.“Oooh! I remember now! Give me a few minutes,” he said.
Five minutes later his colleague invited us into the mortuary. Rodgers’s corpse had been laid on a slab naked, with large stitches along his forearms and thighs, and across his stomach. They looked crudely done. His body seemed shriveled, and his mouth was slightly open and twisted in a pained expression. Rodgers’s skin was deep grey, almost black – matching the clouds above the mortuary. The rawness of what we were seeing would be hard to erase, not least for Andrew. A question from the female mortuary attendant yanked us back to the logistics of the day.
“Do you have his clothes?” she asked. Andrew gave her a blue paper bag with the clothes they had bought to dress him up in. Then, another surprise.
“This body hasn’t been embalmed. We need some money now to prepare his body. You, (gesturing to Andrew) give me 1000 shillings,” she shot back. No matter that Rodgers’s body had been lying at the mortuary for seven days, or that his family had already paid the mortuary fees for his embalming and preparation for burial. By now it was clear that the goal of all of these delays and late-breaking problems was for Andrew to bribe the mortuary attendants.
“Why would we pay you when you were paid to do your job?” Andrew hissed back at the attendant. He was seething, as we all were, at this final insult to a man whose death and the days after it had already been so traumatic. She capitulated, and minutes later Rodgers’s body was dressed and being placed in the back of the hearse.
Andrew had help carrying Rodgers’s coffin from the driver of the hearse and James Maina. James owns a kiosk in Pipeline. James knew Rodgers well. “The first time I met him, he was in company of other men. He used to pass by my store every day and sometimes buy stuff. He was a funny guy,” James remembers.
On the 17th of June, as usual, Rodgers would come by James’s shop to sweep it and get rid of the trash that had been binned the day before. “I was with him that morning. We joked around as usual. After he threw the stuff away and I paid him, he left. That was around 10am; I think he went drinking after that. That was the last time I saw him. In the evening, I closed up shop early and went home,” James recounted to me. Even if James lives close to his store, he wanted to be in his house by 7pm, to bit the curfew.
Dennis Mwangi runs a kiosk just down the road from James. On that day Mwangi had closed up early as well. The enforcement of the dawn to dusk curfew in their neighborhood had been yet another context for heavy handed policing that had turned deadly. According to residents of Pipeline, the police would even shoot in the air to warn people to get off the streets.
“Since the curfew began it has become a trend. Sometimes they will fire more than ten shots into the air so that the person at the furthest corner of Pipeline knows that the curfew is in effect,” Mwangi told me as we walked towards the scene of Rodgers’s killing. It is less than 100 metres from his kiosk. He told me that Rodgers was shot a few minutes to 9:50. The nationwide curfew started at 10 pm.
“That evening though, it was different. The moment the bullet hit (Rodgers) we heard it. It was really loud.” Mwangi expected that the shooters would pass by his kiosk (his kiosk is a few metres away from the turn off onto a major road) but on this day, they went in the opposite direction.
“We listened for an indication that they had left. When they did we rushed over and found (Rodgers) on the ground, bleeding profusely. We tried to give him first aid but by bad luck, he died.”
Mwangi would take out his tablet and take photos of Rodgers’s corpse. Soon, word had spread that he had been killed. James would be the first among Rodgers’s friends to learn about his death: “I received a phone call at six minutes past eight. I was told, ‘Eh! Your friend has been shot and it looks as if he is badly injured!”
James decided to risk being caught by the police, ducking through side-streets and alleys to get to the scene, confirming that indeed “the young man” had been killed.
“Some of these police officers are young and drunk on the little power that they have,” Hillary Mutyambai, the police service’s inspector general said of the reports of killings at the hands of the police. He said this in an interview on a local television station’s newscast, two days after the killing of Rodgers Ochieng.
In that same interview, Mutyambai also alleged that Rodgers may have been shot to death by criminals, not the police. Putting distance between the crimes of individual officers and the institution of the police has been deployed elsewhere. In the United States, police departments across the country are struggling with the impact of policing tactics against minorities.
The killing of Rodgers Ochieng served as yet another anecdote to the brutalization of the poor in Kenya, but it isn’t yet fully accepted as such, not least within police circles. In that same interview, Mutyambai claimed that Rodgers was killed in Buru Buru, almost 14 kilometers away from the spot where he actually was murdered. According to Owino, several people witnessed Rodgers’s killing and that the police were “investigating the matter”.
Fortunately, Rodgers’s post mortem did happen. Dr Peter Ndegwa, the pathologist, showed us a copy of the post mortem report. It makes for a scary anecdote of just how intimate the killing was. All of the three bullets that hit Rodgers were fired from less than 20 centimetres away. His killer was facing him. The bullets “went through the abdomen and lacerated the liver…and were lodged on the back of the right chest cavity, between the 11th and 12th ribs, which were actually fractured (by the impact of the bullets)”. Together, the wounds from all three gunshots ensured that James didn’t survive the night.
There were no signs on Rodgers’s body that he tried to fight off his killers. The person who pulled the trigger melted into the darkness that evening, but one of the three bullets he fired could hold the key to solving Rodgers’s killing. The one lodged between Rodgers’s ribs. After removing it, Dr Peter Ndegwa handed it over to Festus Musyoka, an officer from the Department of Criminal investigations (DCI), for a ballistics examination to take place. At the time of writing this, results from that report are still in the hands of the DCI. Neither has there been any official word on the progress of the investigation beyond a statement in the news from the police spokesman days after Rodgers’s death. Rodgers joins the long list of hundreds of Kenyans who have died extrajudicially.
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