Death of marathon champion turns into tabloid fodder

NAIROBI—The death of a Kenyan marathon champion, first thought accidental, has been tarred by suspicions of suicide, accusations of murder, and reports that the star became a hard-drinking adulterer after winning gold in Beijing.

The only thing known for sure is that Sammy Wanjiru was found dead on May 16 aged 24 after a fall from the balcony of his home in Nyahururu, 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of Nairobi in Kenya’s Rift Valley.

He was finally laid to rest at the family farm close to his home almost one month after his death and after much bickering between relatives.

The night before Wanjiru’s death his wife Trizah Njeri returned home to find her husband in the marital bedroom with a young barmaid, according to local police chief Jasper Ombati. Furious, she locked the couple in and stormed out.

According to a preliminary reconstruction of events, Wanjiru, who had been drinking, forgot he was on the upper floor, headed onto the balcony and, thinking he would stop his wife, jumped into thin air and fell to the ground, dying a few hours later in hospital.

Police toyed briefly with the idea of a suicide. An autopsy was finally carried out at the request of Wanjiru’s mother Hannah more than two weeks after the runner’s death.

The results partly contradicted the police findings, with two of the three pathologists involved concluding that Wanjiru’s death was caused by a violent blow to the back of the head.

And since wounds sustained to the knees and the hands indicated he fell face down, the injury to the back of the head could not have been caused by the fall.

The local police chief however appeared unfazed by the new findings. “Our investigation is continuing, but as we said, the preliminary inquiry showed he fell accidentally,” Ombati said.

Wanjiru’s outstanding sporting achievements made him very rich at a young age.

His fortune might explain the procession of family members — real and imagined — who emerged after his death.

Mary Wacera, one of the athlete’s colleagues said Wanjiru is the father of her seven-month-old daughter, while Judy Wambui, 25 and five months pregnant, claimed the marathon runner is the father of her baby. DNA samples have been taken from the body at Wambui’s request.

Wambui, in a newspaper interview, said that she would no longer have the means to give birth in a top-end maternity hospital and lamented that he had died before buying her the house he had promised.

The list of characters would be incomplete without three middle-aged men all claiming to be Wanjiru’s biological father.

But it is Wanjiru’s mother Hannah, locked in a public feud with her daughter-in-law, who has upstaged the other players in the drama.

Hannah on several occasions filed suits to have the burial postponed, with the result that her son’s body spent almost a month between the hospital morgue and a funeral home.

Convinced that her son was murdered, she has insisted he should not be buried until the investigation is completed. She was arrested on June 4 after she attacked with a machete family members taking part in a traditional Kikuyu pre-burial ceremony organized by the athlete’s grandfather.

Even before Wanjiru’s death, he and his family were not strangers to scandal.

The marathon champion had been scheduled to appear in court on May 23 on charges of illegal possession of a firearm.

Earlier assault charges were dropped when his wife withdrew them after a Valentine’s night out during which Wanjiru presented her with a red rose and kissed her as the cameras rolled.

Former coach Robert Kioni said the athlete, who was previously very disciplined, had accomplished too much too young and had started to associate with “the wrong kind of people.”

“He became a totally different man after winning the gold medal in Beijing,” he told AFP, citing Wanjiru’s “self-destructive problems, ranging from the excessive drinking to having affairs.”

Wanjiru was laid to rest after a requiem mass in the stadium in Nyahururu town where he trained as a boy.

An honorary police corporal, he was given a 21 gun salute at a burial attended by Kenyan athletes, including former women’s marathon champion Catherine Ndereba, long distance runners Daniel Komen, Benjamin Limo and Charles Kamathi and former Olympic champion Kipchoge Keino.

“We have lost a great man. We expected him to successfully defend his title at the London Olympics,” Keino, who heads Kenya’s Olympic committee, told mourners.