This feels like a scene straight out of a movie, but it happened in real life, right before my eyes. A heartbreaking tragedy I’ll never forget.
It was a regular Wednesday morning. I had just opened my store, cleaned up, and started arranging my wares when I heard a piercing scream:
"Wayo! Wannan yaro ka kashe ni!" (This boy, you have killed me!)
The scream echoed through the entire KF Street. Initially, I hesitated to check what was happening, thinking it might just be a fight. But soon, a crowd started gathering in the compound opposite my store and curiosity got the better part of me.
When my store got less busy, I stepped outside to see what was going on and what I saw sent chills down my spine.
A mother sat on the floor crying, drenched in a pool of her child’s blood. The baby was still breathing, but just barely. The story I heard left me speechless.
The mother explained that her baby had been born prematurely and spent four months in the hospital. After running out of money for treatment, they decided to care for the baby at home. That morning, she left the baby in the room while she went to the bathroom, leaving the door unlocked. What she returned to was unimaginable. A 10-year-old boy(who turned out to be her neighbor's child) was sitting in her room, chewing on her baby’s fingers and toes. Blood was everywhere.
Yes, you read that right.
The boy’s mouth and body were soaked in blood. The mother of the child screamed, grabbed her child, and rushed to the hospital. Sadly, the baby didn’t make it. The baby bled to death on her way to the hospital.
To this day, I can’t explain what happened. Was the boy spiritually manipulated? Was he hungry? Is he a vampire ? Or something else entirely? I still can't tell what transpired in the head of the ten years old.
The mother of the child has spent so much to keep the child alive and everything was going on well until this black Wednesday surfaced and clouded her home. The world indeed is a crazy place, a place of survival, a place of unsafe children, oh! What else can I say? I kept staring at this 10 year old boy, who sometimes comes around my store to play with my baby. He is a calm and gentle child.
While the elders of the community put their heads together to proffer a solution for the tragedy, a group of boys trooped into the compound clashing their sticks and knives, chanting angrily and also threatening to kill the ten years old boy, it was in that note I left the arena and back to my store.
Although I later heard that the police took over the case, the boy's family were forced to pay the bereaved two million naira but which ever way is still not worth the life of the baby?
This tragedy still haunts me. Honestly speaking sometimes, reality is stranger and far more heartbreaking than fiction.