My Mother: Lagos Houseboy Murder Victim’s Daughter Speaks as Family Holds Funeral

Dipo Kehinde/

Two women who were killed by a newly employed houseboy in Lagos have been described by an insider as angels who spent their lives easing people’s pains.

Eighty-nine-year-old Mrs Adejoke John, who was strangled to death by the houseboy less than 24 hours of bringing him into the house, would be buried on Friday, July 12, 2019.

Her 38-year-old pregnant daughter, Oreoluwa, who was also brutally stabbed to death by the houseboy, has been buried at the Atan Cemetery in Lagos on July 4.

Before burial sermons and eulogies would commence on Thursday and Friday, one of the children of the slain octogenarian told NewsmakersNG in an interview all about the angel that the devil silenced on June 19, 2019.

Mrs Sikeola Idowu who described her slain younger sister as a lovely soul, had much more to say about her mother who will be buried at Ikoyi Cemetery after a Church Service at First African Church, Tinubu, in Lagos, by 10am following a Wake Keep today at her residence – 4, Ogunlana Drive, in Surulere, Lagos from 4pm to 7pm, according to a family announcement.

Giving a deep breath before she could utter a word, Mrs Idowu who found it hard to speak of her mother in the past tense said in her tribute: “My mother is a disciplinarian. She’s comported, very compassionate, accommodating. I’m trying to tell you about her weaknesses. She was very down to earth with anyone at any time. If you’re her child and you abuse someone outside, like maltreating someone, she will ask you to go back to that person and apologize. She’s very disciplined in her character; hardworking.

“She lost her husband in her 50s. She was married to a man that was more than 15 years older than her.

“To be precise, my father died at the age of 70 and she was 52. Precisely 18 years older than her. I’ve never seen my mother argue with my father. Never seen my parents argue or have any quarrel. When they have it you don’t even know. But the house was always joyful. I’ve never seen my freezer not…

“I’ve never seen a day my mother will say there is no food in the house. She’s very hospitable. She carried even the extended family along. She has trained so many members of the extended family. She is a midwifery nurse; qualified nurse. She retired when she was with the General Hospital, Minna, Niger State, and several times the neighbours that have their children going into labour at home called her and she delivered their babies.

“She’s godly. Before my mother talks to anyone at home in respective of her profession, she believes that it’s God that cures; they only care. The first thing she does is to communicate with God. And when you greet her when she has not done that she will not answer you. And, even when her tenants are owing her she doesn’t throw their property out; she would give them a year free of charge to get another house or to pay. I’ve seen several tenants that lived extra years without pay. We even had a recent one here that was already evicted but she left him. She said that she usually loved seeing him. “She loved hardworking people. She loves people that are ambitiously hardworking. I never never thought my mother would leave us like this, because I still saw her on Sunday, and the house-help was barely employed 24 hours, not up to 24 hours that he killed my mother in cold blood. He also killed my younger sister in cold blood.”

Mrs Idowu, who trained as an artist, is the wife of an accomplished journalist and former spokesman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mr Kayode Idowu.                                

The arrested houseboy, Joseph Ogbu, has made a confessional statement; the murder weapon – a knife with which he stabbed Oreoluwa to death has been found where he hid it in the house, and the police are treating the murder as an open-and-shut case. The Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) in charge of the State Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Department (SCIID), Panti, Yaba, Mrs Yetunde Longe, told NewsmakersNG that the suspect has been charged to Court.

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