Monrovia – The presence of a corpse of a man lying in the middle of a public road in the Lakpazee Community in Sinkor, Monrovia, invoked empathy and apathy in people who had trooped to view the body.”
“One of his eyes had been punched with a sharp object; his head with several holes. And a colony of flies sat on the blood on his bare skin and hovered over the body.
“Ay, God, they killed this young man bad way,” a lady looking at the corpse said and placed her hands on her chest.
“I like the way they killed him,” another lady said while she was leaving the spot.
“They don’t want to work, they just breaking into other people’s homes with knives or guns, stealing, or killing when you can’t give them what they want.”
Some of those viewing the corpse, identified as Kormah, said he had been murdered around 4am.
“He was a member of a gang that went to rob in a house in Lakpazee West Point. They took cell phones, money and other valuable items from the occupants in the house. When they were leaving, the people they robbed shouted rogue…rogue…rogue.
He hid in the bathroom when his friends were running away,” a lady, who identified herself as Marie Sumo, narrated at the scene.
“They have been doing this in Lakpazee and the two Matadi communities for over eight years.”
Another lady, Rose Smith, a trader in the Lakpazee market, told me the man, before his demise, had attempted breaking into her home.
“Around four o, clock this morning, I saw him shaking my window screen while I and my children were sleeping.”
“When I said, ‘what you want’, he cursed me and ran off. After he left, I heard some persons saying, ‘where the rogue…is where is the rogue…?’” she said.
Ms. Mama Miller, who said knows the dead man’s family, told me Kormah had told his mother he was travelling to Lofa County, his native home, but people had been telling the mother they had been seeing her son in Monrovia in the time he had been telling his mother he’s still in Lofa County.
“His aunty saw his body and told his mother. When she saw her son’s body, she almost fainted,” Ms. Miller narrated to friends after the body had been taken away for burial.
Before his death, Kormah produced three children. “His mother was taking care of two of the children while he was away,” Ms. Miller told me.
Kormah was the only child of his mother, another person said.
Another lady, who lives near Kormah’s mother in Lakpazee, said he started “big-time stealing when he was a child in the community,” she told some persons in the group of people viewing the corpse or snapping it with their mobile phones.
Little Kormah started stealing during the presidency of Mr. Charles Taylor, when those caught red-handed in the act or considered prime suspects were either lynched or burnt on car tyre by mob in the Lakpazee County.
“This was around 1999 up to 2003,” another community member, Gracious Glaybah, 21, told me at the scene.
The body of Kormah was removed at 1:10pm by a team of the Liberia National Police.
While the Police was picking up the body, Kormah’s mother pleaded to them to allow her follow them to the burial site. “I want to see where you he will be,” she pleaded.
One of the officers told the pleading mother she could take the corpse for burial, but she should first make a Police statement. The grieving mother couldn’t, and the Police sped off with the corpse.
The action of persons on Kormah is described as “jungle justice” in Liberia—an allusion to illegal execution of a criminal or suspected criminal by an angry persons or a group. Liberian government, of Madam Ellen Sirleaf, had warned Liberians umpteenth time against taking the law into their hands.
The government’s anti-mob justice warning has fallen on deaf ears, especially in areas with no Police presence, or during the nighttime when the Police can’t be found to rescue the person caught in robbery, or a strange person caught near a robbery spot.
There are reports of armed robbers showing up in neighborhood where they had operated, a day after they had been caught in the act and thrown into a Police cell.
“This makes undermines people’s trust in the justice system for criminals and causes mob justice,” a male community member of the Lakpazee community, who doesn’t want his name appear in this story, told me near the spot Kormah’s body was abandoned.
Report by Samuel G. Dweh/Freelance Journalist
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