It started as a squabble between two ladies. One was the landlord’s daughter, the other a tenant’s little sister. In time, it graduated to a brawl. People, including the landlord, came to separate them. And there was peace – or so the people thought. Just when everyone was just settling down with what he or she was doing, there was a fresh commotion.
The two ladies had gone back at each other. This time, viciously. By the time it all ended, one of the ladies lay dead. It was the landlord’s daughter, named Rhoda. It was said that her alleged assailant, the tenant’s little sister named Happiness, stabbed her in the chest. Her dead body is now in the morgue in Isolo area of Lagos.
Rhoda, a 23-year-old hairdresser and mother of two (she was nursing the last one before her death) was living in her father’s house, at 23,Odulaju Street, Sabo, Ajangbadi, Ojo, in Lagos, with her children. Her father Oladuyoye Abel is a pastor with Christ Apostolic Church.
Her alleged killer, Happiness, 19, from Nnewi South, Anambra State and a salesgirl at Alaba International Market, Ojo, said she never intended to kill Rhoda. According to her it was Rhoda who wanted to stab her. Narrating the incident, she said, she returned from the just-concluded Lagos International Trade Fair to notice that her bathroom slippers were not at the entrance of her room. She started looking for them and saw Rhoda’s first child of about four years wearing them. According to her, she took them from the little girl and implored her not to wear them again because she had lost several pairs left at the entrance of her door.
“I was cautioning the little girl and I didn’t know that her mother was by the well-side. Instead of Rhoda to caution her child, she started asking the little girl why she should wear the slippers of a valueless, worthless, miserable and good-for-nothing girl. She was calling me other unprintable names. It was from then that fight erupted and her father and my brother intervened immediately and separated us. That was about 7.30pm. Her father was angry with her and he asked her if she was the only lady in the compound that every time, she would quarrel with people.” Happiness said, in annoyance, the old man went inside the house and started throwing out his daughter’s belongings, asking her to “leave the house as he is fed up with her trouble. My brother also cautioned me that this shouldn’t be the reason to fight. I wanted to go inside when she rushed at me from behind and I shouted and drew the attention of people that thought that the fight had ended and I fell on the door of the tenants’ kitchen and she was holding my jugular. Her mother was there, I didn’t know how she got a kitchen knife on the floor probably left by a tenant that was cooking and wanted to stab me. I overpowered her and took it from her and it slipped through my finger and I stabbed her. It was later that I heard that it was on the chest that I stabbed her.
“As the fight was going on she had vowed that either of us would die that evening. I went inside and heard that she was lying down and bleeding. My brother made move for her to be taken to the hospital but her mother objected and said she would grind pepper and onions and put in her nose to revive her and when she gets up she would then be taken to the hospital. It was when the pepper and onion therapy had been administered and she didn’t get up that my brother went to the Ilemba Hausa police station, Ajangbadi to report,” Happiness narrated. She then asked: “Why should I deliberately kill her? Even though we had problem before, but we had made up our differences.”
Happiness is now in the homicide section of State Investigative Bureau, Muslim Smith, Yaba. She is very sacred of how the whole thing would turn out. She is also afraid of want might become of her aged mother in the village when she hears the news. According to her, she lost her father at an early age.
In an emotion laden voice, Pastor Abel, father of the decease, told Saturday Sun that he is still wondering why Happiness should stab her daughter to death. According to him, Happiness went into the kitchen to take the knife she used to commit the murder and the family wants justice to be properly done. He said both of them had problems but they made up long before the incident. Rhoda died at gate of the hospital she was rushed to. The kitchen knife used for the alleged murder has not been found.-SUN
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