Ruth Karugi would be a 35-year-old doctor today working to save lives from Covid-19, or maybe an emergency room trauma physician, or a paediatrician healing children.
Except that she isn’t. Ruth has been missing for 13 years since she was a third-year medical student.
It’s been a harrowing wait for a Kiambu family still hoping police will discover the whereabouts of their daughter who disappeared from Moi University on April 13, 2007.
It’s a cold missing persons case.
The family of Abraham Kaigwa sent their second-born daughter Ruth to study medicine at Moi University, hoping she would help both society and her family.
Their dream and anticipation has turned to anguish as Ruth mysteriously vanished from her hostel. No clue has come their way.
Do they mourn the dead, search for a lost child or keep hoping one day she will turn up? Every day is another day without closure.
“It’d be better to know she is dead so we get her body or bury an emblem if we can’t obtain the body. It is unending pain,” Caroline Kaigwa, Ruth’s elder sister, told the Star on Tuesday.
A statement her father Abraham Kaigwa made to the Eldoret police said that on the day she went missing, she had been watching television at a friend’s place at 10am on a Saturday.
The matter was booked on Wednesday, April 18, 2007, at the Eldoret police station, OB-26/18/4/07.
Ruth later is said to have received a phone call from George Ngare, her ex-boyfriend, telling her to change her clothes before they went out on Saturday night. He denies seeing her since they broke up the previous year.
The statement said the caller instructed her not let people know she was leaving or where she was going.
Ruth shot up from her seat, rushed to her hostel and put on a blue pair of jeans, a red top, navy blue sweater and black shoes and left. That was the last time she would ever be seen by those who knew her.
At 6am the following day, she sent her friend Esther Kinyeru a text message that read: “morning dear, nilijienjoy kweli n right now niko kwa huyu chali rich. Tell Lucile 2 expect me on Sun jioni. Sina charge, bye.”
This was the last anyone heard from Ruth.
Ngare, the alleged ex-boyfriend, denied ever going out with Ruth or ever meeting her in the days running up to her disappearance.
He said he had never spoken with her on the phone since they broke up the previous year.
“You can even take my phone and do whatever you wish to see if I am telling the truth,” Ngare told police in a statement.
He said the last time he saw Ruth was in class on Thursday April 12 and Friday April 13. In fact, he sat behind her on Friday, the statement said.
From the father’s statement, one gets the impression of a frustrated man not receiving the help he needs from the police to trace his daughter.
“It is a devastating pain,” her sister Caroline said, adding her family is still in denial, praying and hoping Ruth will pop up someday.
“My sister loved reading a lot and I don’t think she just left school like that. If she is alive, then someone turned her mad and confused her,” she said.
Caroline said they hope the family will one day get closure on Ruth’s disappearance and move on.