“My husband shot me when I was pregnant.” Paralysed Mum Recounts Her Ordeal

“He didn’t shout. He didn’t do anything. Because I was feeling like a balloon, I thought he could not carry me so I asked him to call… there were two boys on the compound… so I asked him to call them so that one could go for a taxi so that one could help carry me to the taxi,” Benita narrates what happened when she opened her eyes that morning.

One of the young men who went to help Effort carry Benita to the hospital is John Asaah. John lives in the same compound. His room is about five metres away from the Dankwas. At about 3a.m. of Saturday, August 29, 2015, John said he heard a gunshot that was “too loud” and appeared close to the house. “It didn’t take hours and I heard my friend call me to come and help him to take his wife to the hospital.” That friend was Effort, Benita’s husband.

According to John, Effort did not give him the impression that Benita had been shot.“He was coming as if nothing had happened. ‘Oh Johny, wifee no dey feel fine oo. Go bring me taxi,’” John quotes Effort asking him (John) for help in casual pidgin English. You won’t even know that something like that had happened,” John says.

John added that if he had known that it was a shooting incident, he would not have entered the room to help. Effort, he says, did not mention any shooting even as they sat in the taxi and headed for the hospital.

“The husband didn’t tell us anything. All that I knew was that the wife was pregnant so I thought she was about to deliver.” John says when the taxi driver asked what was wrong with Benita, he (John) said it was her first pregnancy. Benita’s husband, who was also in the taxi, did not mention that his wife had been shot. John says Benita was first taken to the maternity ward of the Tema General Hospital. He says the first time he realized Benita had been shot was when a nurse at the maternity ward interrogated the husband and he said it was a gunshot.

“The nurse asked the husband to show her where the gunshot was and he opened the dress on the chest and I saw a hole on her chest and some small blood,” John says. The nurse told them gunshots were not treated at the maternity ward and so referred them to the accident centre. At the accident centre, doctors at the Tema General Hospital realized Benita had a spinal injury so they referred her to the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital.

According to Benita’s father, Mr. S.O.S Yirenkyi, Effort refused to report the shooting of his wife to the police. “We did all we could but he would not go to the police,” says Mr. Yirenkyi. “He said this was a domestic issue involving a husband and wife so there was no need to report it.” Later in the day, Bright Ofori, Benita’s 25-year old brother went to the police station to report the incident.

“If you are with your wife in the room and you wake up to find out that she has been shot, should you not be the first to report to the police?” Mr. S.O.S Yirenkyi, Benita’s 68-year-old father asked.

John says when he returned from the hospital that day, he went round the house and tried to locate any form of penetration or break in but there was none. “We even took chairs and climbed onto the roof to see if there was anything from the roof, but there was nothing to show that maybe the thing was coming from armed robbers,” he says.

When this reporter visited the house, he found that the windows and the doors had mosquito nets and wire mesh. They were covered with curtains so if anybody wanted to shoot from outside, they would have had to cut through the mosquito net and wire mesh, shift the curtains aside before they could locate their target. But all the mosquito nets at the doors and windows were intact.

“Me, I can say that the thing (shooting) happened in the room,” John emphasises. “If you want to know the truth, then it will be [between] Benita and her husband who know what happened.”

“There were two people in the room. One person was shot. Police investigation revealed that the shot was not from outside. So who fired the shot?” asked, Mr. S.O.S. Yirenkyi, Benita’s father. “I suspect Benita’s husband shot her,” he alleged.

Benita also shares the same view. She believes her husband, Effort, shot her.

On September 15, 2015, more than two weeks after the shooting incident, the police arrested Effort Dankwa for investigation and he denied shooting his wife.

On September 16^th and 30^th 2015, the police also arrested one Ernestina Dede Lagbeneku, who confirmed being in a relationship with Effort Dankwa for the past five months. The two of them were cautioned and bailed “pending further investigations.”

Tema Region Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Juliana Obeng, said, “For now, fingers are pointing to a certain direction, but because investigations are still ongoing we cannot confirm. But then, questions are coming up and answers are coming up. The question now is: who did it? Let me give you an example: If I were with you alone in the house and I wake up to have some injuries on my body and I find some other things in the room that have to do with blood stains and there are no other persons in the room, and nobody came to the room, then your guess is as good as mine.”

The police PRO, however, says they cannot draw a conclusion now.

Criminologist and Dean of the Central University College Faculty of Law, Professor Ken Agyemang Attafuah agrees with the police that based on the facts surrounding the case, Effort Dankwa “is a legitimate person for the police to consider as the prime suspect.”

He said in the panic and the desire to save Benita, the family took certain pieces of evidence for granted because it never occurred to them that the one who shot her could be someone in the room with her. One of such pieces of evidence was a bloodstained towel that Effort allegedly asked Benita’s cousin to throw away.

Priscilla Asare, 25, was sent by her mother (Benita’s aunt) to fetch a stove at the crime scene (Benita and Effort’s home) to be taken to the hospital. This was on Wednesday September 2, 2015, four days after Benita was shot.

“When I got there, Benita’s husband said I should tidy up the room. In the process, I found a towel stained with blood, the blood had dried up. When I told him (Effort) about the towel, he said I should throw it away,” Priscilla explains.

When Priscilla took the towel home and told her mother about it, she asked her not to throw the towel away. “My mother said I should wash it for her so I did.” Priscilla said she was also the one who washed the bloodstained bed sheet on which Benita and Effort lay when the shooting happened.

Benita says when she opened her eyes that morning, there was not much blood on her body. John has confirmed this. He said Benita wore a white night gown as they took her to the hospital and if there was any blood on her, he would have seen it before they got to the hospital.

Benita says when she opened her eyes, she did not see her husband wipe any blood from her body so she was surprised when the towel soaked with blood was used on her. A woman who lives in the house and was present when the police first entered the crime scene says when they entered, there was very little blood on the mattress and the bed sheet. She wondered if there wouldn’t have been more blood had there been a gunshot.

“I think he shot my daughter and cleaned all the blood before my daughter became conscious,” Mr. Yirenkyi suggests. “He thought my daughter had died, but God saved her.”

Criminologist Professor Ken Ataffuah says this is possible. “From the report, a neighbor heard a gunshot around 3am. It was not until at about 5am that this woman complained of pain and asked her husband for assistance. She possibly was in coma for a while or she had been chloroformed. There is evidence from what you [this reporter] tell me of a towel that contained blood and that towel ought to be taken to the police forensics for investigation.”

There are also claims they had a sour marriage.

See Also

How A 26-Year-Old Woman Suffered Organ Failure From Hair Cream Which Caused Her Kidneys To Shut Down

Benita met her husband nine years ago. They are both members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect. And that’s where they met. They dated for five years and were married for four years before the tragedy struck.