I knelt and begged him, yet he slaughtered my daughter in my presence –...

7 years ago

I knelt and begged him, yet he slaughtered my daughter in my presence –...

The inch-long scar on the neck of 53-year-old Mrs. Christiana Ashinwo, is one of the physical reminders of the horror of Sunday, April 24, 2016.

She sat on a chair quietly in the sitting room of a house in Agbado area of Lagos, which she built with the sweat and suffering of many years as a single mother and plank vendor. Her head was bowed when our correspondent went to meet her.

But when Mrs Ashinwo looked up, her eyes were glazed with a faraway look that would easily giveaway the fact that she could have witnessed trauma, great trauma that she obviously had yet to recover from.

Who would blame her? Watching her daughter killed before her presence, is enough to give her chills every moment for the rest of her life. The horrific incident she witnessed and survived few months ago in Kwara State remains so fresh on her mind.

Our correspondent had reported on April 30 how Mrs. Ashinwo and her daughter, 30-year-old Oluwatosin Ashinwo, an employee of MTN in Ilorin, Kwara State were attacked by a knife-wielding obsessed suitor of the young lady, 45-year-old David Ogundele.

Mrs. Ashinwo survived the attack, her daughter didn’t.

The older woman’s injuries were no less extensive, as she spent many days in the emergency unit of a hospital in Ilorin as doctors battled to save her life. She would later spend another two months in the intensive care unit of the hospital.

Our correspondent paid her a visit in Lagos, days after she was discharged and brought back home.

With a very raspy voice and intermittent cough that came out with each word, one would conclude that all was still not well with the woman, who was left for dead in the pool of her own blood in Ilorin that fateful day.

For her, the agony she feels with each morsel of food and gulp of liquid passing through her knife-damaged throat was nothing compared to the daily torment of thinking about how she lost her first child, breadwinner, and daughter.

“I knelt down to beg my daughter’s killer as he held the knife that later took my daughter’s life. I thought kneeling would pacify him,” she said.

The story Mrs. Ashinwo told was one of agony, climaxing at the moment she la!d in a pool of her own blood and tried with every ounce of her waning strength to crawl to where her daughter la!d lifeless.

“I was dead; I don’t know why God brought me back. But I am sure I was dead that day. I tried to crawl and touch my daughter but my strength failed. I could see she was not breathing. There was blood everywhere; mine and my daughter’s,” she said.

According to her, the day of the attack was the first time he would meet the killer, Ogundele.

Mrs. Ashinwo said, “The first time we spoke, he called me and introduced himself as Engineer David. He told me he was my daughter’s friend and I should help him to appeal to my daughter to marry him.