Confidence, Joseph, Egbe. Inset: Joseph at the house of his kidnapper
| credits: File copy
| credits: File copy
Mr. Egbe Donatus and wife, Confidence, woke up with their two children, Joseph and Godwin, on Sunday, March 15, 2014, hail and hearty without an inkling that the hand of a child-snatcher lurked in the shadows.
By nightfall, one of their children was gone and a search party would turn up nothing. Their second child, five-year-old Joseph, had simply vanished without a trace.
For the next two months, the plight of the Donatus would mirror the popular saying that it is sometimes better if one’s child dies than for such child to go missing without a trace.
The day Joseph went missing in the front of the small two-bedroom apartment where the family live in Church Village, Ipaja, Lagos, became etched in their memory.
“I wondered if Joseph was taken by ritual killers. I could not imagine what they might have done to him. I always cried each time I remembered the day he went missing,” Donatus narrated to Saturday Punch
Donatus, a commercial motorcyclist, was away at work that Sunday, when he received a call to come back home. He got home only to meet a crowd of residents gathered in front of his house.
A mother’s agony
The missing boy’s mother, a petty trader, explained that few minutes before he was kidnapped, she came back from church with her two children – Joseph and his elder brother, Godwin.
She said, “Joseph told me he wanted to go and play with one of his friends beside our house after we came back from church but I told him he should give me some minutes to shower.
“I rushed in, bathed and changed my clothes. I came out again a few minutes later and did not see him. I thought he had wandered off to his friend’s house next door. I went there and called him but I got no answer. I went to his friend’s house and they said he had not been seen there either.
“I became worried, I started screaming his name. We went from door to door. Neighbours and other residents too joined me. We searched everywhere. I screamed and cried but my child was gone. But I knew he could not have wandered off because he had never done so before. I knew something was very wrong.”
The residents of Church Village and neighbours of the Donatus organised themselves into search parties and knocked on doors. Among the crowd searching for the boy and knocking on doors to enquire if anybody saw the boy, was a friendly and concerned woman called Mrs. Beatrice Iwu, restaurateur, who operates Feed Well Restaurant in the area. But the groups couldn’t find the boy.
Then on May 12, the Donatus family got a break.
Donatus’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Oluchi Emereole, got a call from a young man in Enugu, who knew about the missing child.
The woman said, “I got the phone number of one Mr. Fidelis from the young man. The man told me that a lady he knew in Enugu, the daughter of Mrs. Iwu (the restaurateur who also helped in the search) had been arrested for kidnapping and selling a child.