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According to her, life was not easy growing up, born in a family of 8 siblings and raised by a single mother, they had to make do with so little, sometimes nothing at all.
According to 35-year-old Atieno, to quench the pangs of hunger she was forced to steal food from her classmates.
“I had to take care of my younger siblings; life was really difficult for us. I would steal my classmates’ food, I had borrowed them for too long, I had become a nuisance, eventually, they preferred going home to eat instead of carrying their meals to school,” she recalled on Citizen TV’s Shajara Na Lulu Hassan show.
In Class 8, she found solace in a boy who got her pregnant. Naïve and oblivious of her predicament, a friend advised her to take a test and get rid of the pregnancy.
“I got involved with the boy then because I felt taken care of, he used to give me money and I would buy the things I needed. For the first time, I felt taken care of. I wanted to get rid of the pregnancy. A friend took me to a certain clinic for the procedure. But the doctor had the intention to have sex with me but I got scared and left,” she recalled.
The boy responsible for the pregnancy did not take responsibility and instead became abusive. Atieno however kept the baby and gave birth.
“Life became worse after giving birth, with zero support from my mother and the man responsible, because of the stress, my breast milk dried up and I started feeding my child porridge at one month. Soon after, I moved in with another man who now introduced me into the criminal world,” she said.
“No one cared for me and my child. I moved in with Kevin who provided a shelter for us, but he was busted and went into hiding and that’s when I decided to go back home,” she added.
Kevin came back later and asked her to look for two more girls to help him carry the guns as they planned their heist. It was good money; she started focusing on the crime and ended up neglecting the baby.
“The first mission I made Ksh.5,000 shillings. It was easy money and no one was getting hurt, we would go steal as far as Machakos. I joined the Embakasi girls using the money I would get from robbing people,” she said.
Most of her friends in crime were dropping dead every day and she felt like death was always near them, and their survival was barely sheer luck.
“I had the desire to make ends meet and live a better life. Seeing my friends die played a huge role in my quitting. We went to steal in Kibwezi and two of my friends died at the scene of the crime, leaving their lifeless bodies behind as an eye-opener. Deep down I knew that if I continued with the crime, I would die like them too,” she said. BY CITIZEN DIGITAL