Families’ agony of burying wrong bodies

Death is devastating, and when it strikes, it leaves the bereaved family deeply wounded.

Grieving families hope that after the burial of a loved one, the healing process should begin in earnest so they can resume normal life.

However, this was not the case for two families in Siaya County, who, after undergoing a painful period of mourning, rudely discovered they had buried bodies that did not belong to their relatives.

The revelation came two weeks after burial rites had been performed in May 2018.

The two families from Rarieda and Bondo sub-counties in were in deep shock.

The reality of burying the wrong bodies following misidentification at a morgue was too much to bear.

Mr Fredrick Waga, who lived with his ailing sister, Ms Elida Abuoro, at his Kericho home for two months before she passed on, narrated to the Nation the events leading to the mix-up.

His 49-year-old sister had been battling throat cancer.

When she died in May, the family led by Mr Waga took the body to St. Elizabeth Mission Hospital mortuary in Lwak.

After settling on a burial date a week later, the family set off to collect the body. Then trouble that would leave entire village speaking in hushed tones began.

The family disagreed with the morgue attendant after they realised they had been given the wrong body.

“I asked the attendant to let us view the other bodies lying at the funeral parlour and see if we could identify my sister using birthmarks but he would hear none of that,” said Mr Waga.

So after failing to convince the attendant, they grudgingly collected the body and ferried it to Ndhere village in Rarieda.

The burial went on even as the deceased’s mother protested that the body did not belong to her daughter. But more drama was yet to come.

A week later, another family from Bondo, led by their son John Odhiambo, also went to the same mortuary to collect the body of their 72-year-old mother, Ms Leonida Achochi.

Strangely, they also disagreed with the morgue attendant over the identification of the body.

But after a back and forth, they picked up the body and proceeded to bury it.

After the burial, fresh revelations emerged. A relative would be the one to help the grieving families solve the puzzle.

According to Mr Waga, the relative, who hails from Rarieda, happened to have attended the burial in Bondo.

“During the funeral, she overheard mourners saying the woman who was being buried could have been wrongly identified,” he recalls

“Since she had earlier attended my sister’s burial in Rarieda, she told the Bondo family that we also had doubts over the body we had collected from the same morgue.”

Later that night after the burial, a team from Bondo set off on a journey to Rarieda in search of the truth. The two families held a nightlong meeting and after a review of the photos taken during the two burials, they were convinced that they had exchanged the bodies.

Immediately, the process of exhuming the bodies in readiness for fresh burials began.

Subsequent meetings attended by the two families, police, chiefs and their assistants from Rarieda and Bondo were held.

A week later, the families got a court order to exhume the two bodies. The bodies were exhumed and ferried back to the morgue.

Mr Richard Nyangir, Ms Abuoro’s relative, said the morgue attendant was to blame for the mix-up.

“He insisted that the body was ours even after we noticed that the woman was older than my sister-in-law,” he said.

The hospital’s administration declined to comment on the matter when Nation visited the facility.

A relative of the family from Rarieda said the hospital had to foot the bill for transporting the bodies for fresh burials.

“They agreed to do so as a way of accepting liability for the wrong identification of the bodies “ he said.

According to Dr Peter Okoth, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital’s chief executive officer, such cases are common.

Dr Okoth said the incidents may occur when the body is wrongly marked by the morgue attendant or when bodies are mutilated and cannot be easily identified.