Twenty-three-year-old Temitope Ogunleye was a beacon of hope to his aging father, identified simply as Mr. Ogunleye and the principal of EDU High School in Erio community, Ekiti West Local Government Area of Ekiti State.
He was the bright future the family was hoping for until the early hours of last Monday when he was callously shot dead in the presence of his father, mother and younger sister, Yetunde, in their home at Ado Ekiti by suspected armed robbers.
However, before they shot the NDII Accountancy student, the gang of robbers, said to have been about a dozen in number, had attacked homes in the Olorunda Zone 4 area, especially the neighbours of the Ogunleyes, including a 55-year-old retiree and widow, Mrs Titilade Oriire.
Oriire, while narrating her ordeal to newsmen, said the robbers had stormed the neighbourhood at about 1:30am, banged on her door and ordered her to open the door or face “the ugly consequences of disobeying them.”
She said the three houses in the compound numbered 3, 4 and 5 seem to have been marked by the robbers. They were shouting as they compelled her to open the door, threatening the widow with death.
“They were hitting the front and back doors with stones. They had broken into two groups.
While some of them were making their efforts to break in through the back door, the other group was at the front door.”She said “the robbers destroyed the front door, shot into the air to emphasise their seriousness and threatened to kill me. But when I raised my voice that I am a widow and that I have nothing, they decided to leave me and turned to the Ogunleye’s house.”
Yetunde Ogunleye, the younger sister of the slain Temitope, recounted her ordeal, saying “they came to the house before 2am and were shooting indiscriminately.”
According to her, only four of them were at home when the bandits came. That included her late brother, mother and father, who was beaten mercilessly and was inflicted with machete wounds.
She said: “We had earlier heard the noise coming from the home of Mrs Oriire, which sent a signal to us that robbers were on rampage. But minutes later they came to our house, peeped through the windows and threatened that we should open the door or face the dire consequences. She lamented that they sounded as a group of people with very vile temper and were unabashed in their threats “to kill all of us in the house.”
“They broke the glass on the window in front of the house and illumuinated the living room with their torches. Shortly after, they started shooting incessantly when we didn’t open the door on time. They had slipped their hands through the broken window.
“It was at this time that I ran inside to tell my father. He then instructed us to shout and we did so. Temitope was hit in the stomach while the shooting lasted and was in a pool of his blood. At this point, the robbers had already entered our parlour and were beating my mother. In fact, when they sighted my father, they beat him and left him for dead before they left the neighbourhood.”
She said Temitope and Mr Ogunleye were later rushed to the hospital by neighbours after the robbers had left. Mr Ogunleye, they said, is out of coma and is now in a critical condition in an undisclosed hospital in the state capital.
“He has not been told of the death of Temitope. We don’t know how to break the news to him because each time he regains consciousness, he keeps asking after him, but we keep telling him that he is in the hospital,”
Culled from Nigerian Tribune
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