Posted by By Molly Kilete, Abuja on
A teenage mother, Miss Blessing Ukwayi, shook residents of new Nyanya, a satellite town in Nassarawa State, Monday (July 18), when she admitted poisoning her four year-old son with rat poison (popularly known as Otapia pia).
A teenage mother, Miss Blessing Ukwayi, shook residents of new Nyanya, a satellite town in Nassarawa State, Monday (July 18), when she admitted poisoning her four year-old son with rat poison (popularly known as Otapia pia).
Blessing Ukwayi, an Ogoja indigene from Obudu in Cross-Rivers state, who resides with her step-mother who is a trader and her other siblings, successfully carried out her dastardly act on that fateful day without any sign of evil she was about to hatch.
The teenage mother who is now in police custody at the New Nyanya divisional police headquarters, told Sunday Sun that she ended her boy's life with just N30 which she used in buying a bottle of the rat poison which cost N20, and groundnut with the remaining N10.
Blessing told Sunday Sun that she mixed the rat poison with the groundnut before feeding her son. She narrated how she called her son after buying the groundnut which they ate together.
Few minutes after the child drank the poison, the boy reportedly told her evil mum, "Mummy my belle dey pain me," and started writhing in pain.
When the pain got so unbearable, she called one of their neighbours to tell her that Emmanuel was ill. By the time the woman rushed there, Emmnauel, according to Blessing, had started forming in the mouth.
Alarmed, the woman decided to take the child to the Mararaba General Hospital for medical attention
.
At the hospital, the doctors discovered that the child was already short of blood and would need blood transfusion. But before help could come to him, little Emmanuel (whose name translates as 'God with us") was gone. He was stone dead.
Suspecting foul play on the part of the mother, neighbours demanded explanation from the now sobbing kid's mother. The evil mum later confessed to feeding the dead kid with Otapiapia after a meal of ground-nut.
News of the circumstances leading to the death of the innocent child soon made the rounds in the neighbourhood. Before anyone knew what was happening, a mob comprising patients, visitors and those on admission, had gathered, ready to lynch the evil mother.
But some plain-clothes police officers who were in the hospital, whisked her from the scene to a nearby police post to keep her away from the angry mob. The protesters still traced her to the police station to vent their anger on herskin her alive, but the police also played smart and took her to the Divisional Police headquarters, by which time the news had spread like wild fire.
After successfully handing her to the divisional headquarters, the police then went to the hospital with Blessing, from where they picked the remains of late Emmanuel, for photographs, before depositing the body in the mortuary.
On why she killed her four year- old boy, Blessing told Sunday Sun that she took the gruesome action due to what she described as "the kind of sufferness wey I dey suffer."
According to her, she was abandoned by Emmanuel's father, who got her pregnant when she was in JSS3 class. She also said Emmanuel's father who is right now in the village had never cared for his son and that she gave him the poison not to end his life, but to get him sick and get the father's attention.
She claimed she didn't know the poison was going to kill the child, and that Emmanuel cried so much about stomach pain before he eventually passed on.