In today’s court news, Joyce Muthoni Mburu, daughter of the late Mzee Kinani Mburu, has told a court of the difficulties she faced trying to see her ailing father shortly before his passing.
Testifying in an ongoing dispute over her father’s burial site, Joyce told Magistrate Gitonga that Mzee Mburu should be laid to rest in Gatanga, where he had lived his entire life.
According to Joyce, her father had contacted her in the UK, where she works as a nurse, and asked if she could travel home to see him. She said he hinted at having important information he wanted to share with her in person.
“I immediately flew back to Kenya,” she testified, “but when I arrived at our home, my father wasn’t there.”
Joyce recounted asking a worker at the home about her father’s whereabouts, but was simply told to “hold on.” It was only later that she learned he had been taken to a hospital in Gilgil. However, upon arriving there, she could not locate him.
Medical staff reportedly advised her to visit the morgue, mentioning a body that had been collected from the roadside earlier that morning.
“I refused to believe it,” Joyce told the court. “That’s not the God I serve. I could not accept that I had traveled all the way from the UK only to find my father in a mortuary.”
After receiving a description of the body, she determined that it was not her father.
Joyce further alleged that Patrick Karanja, the fifth defendant in the case, withheld information about her father’s hospitalization and subsequently switched off his phone to avoid communication.
She said it was only after the local chief intervened that Karanja finally disclosed the whereabouts of the late Mzee Mburu.
