Nakuru police yet to find man who went missing 10 months ago
Mr Alfred Cheruiyot, 39, who went missing on May 6, 2016 in Nakuru Town and is yet to be found 10 months later. PHOTO | SULEIMAN MBATIAH | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- Mr Alfred Cheruiyot, 39, was last seen on Friday, May 6, 2016 in Nakuru Town where he was taking beer with his brother.
- His brother says received a call from one of his colleagues asking to meet him.
- Nakuru police boss Joshua Omukata said that the case is still active and that officers from DCI are on it.
Ten months after the disappearance of an employee of the Geothermal Development Company (GDC), police in Nakuru have no concrete leads on his whereabouts.
Mr Alfred Cheruiyot, 39, was last seen on Friday, May 6, 2016 in Nakuru Town where he was taking beer with his cousin.
According to the brother, Mr Japheth Kimutai, Cheruiyot received a call from one of his colleagues asking to meet him.
“It was around 7pm when he received a call and said he had to go and that he would follow us shortly,” Mr Kimutai recalled.
At 7.30pm, his wife, Ms Jacklyn Rotich, called him about a chicken order that he was to deliver the following day.
“He said he would be back early. That was the last time I spoke to him,” Ms Rotich told the Nation.
She said that she called him again at 9.30pm before she went back to sleep but the phone went unanswered.
NOT YET HOME
When she woke up at 1am and realised that her husband was not yet home, Ms Cheruiyot panicked.
“I called both his Safaricom and Orange lines but no one answered. When I tried again ten minutes later, the lines had gone off.
“I then called Japheth wanting to know if he had slept in his mother’s house that night,” she said.
The two families share the same piece of land in Ngata estate with a 500-meter distance between them.
On Saturday morning the family woke up to the realisation that the father of three was missing.
“We called his friends and began a frantic search for him. His friends drove to Central and Bondeni police stations thinking he might have been arrested the previous night for being too drunk,” Ms Sophie Kosgei, his sister said.
SEARCH INTENSIFIED
After failing to trace him, the family made an official report at Central Police Station on Sunday morning but the physical search did not stop there.
For the next three weeks, the twelve siblings, together with other family members, left their work stations and went looking for him in every police station, mortuary and major hospital in Naivasha, Gilgil, Nyahururu, Molo, Eldama Ravine, Njoro, Nairobi, Kiambu and Kapsabet counties.
“We also employed about 300 youths to look for him at Menengai crater. Others went to Njoro River and Rongai River. We have really tried,” a distraught Ms Kosgei said.
Ms Kosgei said they still travel to Nairobi’s City Mortuary once a month to try and identify the bodies of unknown peoples with hope that Mr Cheruyot’s will turn up.
Nakuru police boss Joshua Omukata said that the case is still active and that officers from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations are doing all they can to trace the missing man.
