Waiter: Lali did not inform hotel of Tecra fall

 

Omar Lali, the playboy boyfriend of Keroche Breweries heiress Tecra Muigai, did not report to Jaha House management of any emergency on the day of her alleged fall, the hotel’s house keeper told the police.

Geoffrey Maliolo, a room steward who was in charge of the suite that Omar and Tecra checked into, told the police that despite clear instructions complete with contacts for customers to inform  management of an emergency Omar did not do so.

He did not call for help after Tecra allegedly slipped and fell from the stairs, he added. 

Maliolo told detectives that the rooms the two occupied had emergency instructions for customers clearly displayed requiring that the management be notified of any incident but Omar did not comply.

“The customer-Omar Lali- did not call that number during the alleged incident,” he said.

Lali told the police Tecra succumbed to head injuries sustained after accidentally falling from a flight of stairs at the hotel. 

Maliolo says in his four-page statement that when he reported to work on April 23 last year, he did not find the couple in their master bedroom but found "a sizeable blood drop at the floor of the stair curve."

His frantic effort to look for the couple later bore fruit when Omar eventually called the hotel manager, Evans Shamwama, telling him that he had rushed Tecra to King Fahad Hospital after "a small accident" in the suit and they should not be worried. 

Lali told them to clean up the blood and other dirt on the floor and organise the room. 

"[Lali] explained to Evans that they had a small accident back in the house and that if we happened to have seen or gotten in the house we should [not] be worried and that they were at King Fahad hospital Lamu," his four-page statement reads.

He would a go a head and clean up, saying that the blood on the floor was still fresh. 

At the hospital gate, Maliolo said, Lali explained that they were drinking together in the dining lounge when Tecra rose to go for a call in the first floor. She slipped and fell. 

A postmortem examination conducted last year by the chief government pathologist found that Tecra, then 29, died from fractures on the skull. There was also internal bleeding in the brain. 

The examination, however, cited the absence of injuries in other parts of the body, including the long bones as reason to suggest that Tecra could have been hit with a blunt object. 

A Nairobi court started hearing an inquest into her death last week, with her mother Tabitha Karanja and other witnesses testifying. 

The hearing was postponed to May 4.  BY THE STAR