50-year-old Food Vendor Killed by Police Stray Bullet | Son Cries Out for Justice

Kudirat Adebayo, a 50-year old food vendor at Onipanu toll gate area of Lagos state, was shot by an officer, Charles aka TBoy when he was chasing some ‘Yahoo boys’ (conmen) trying to run away. Two other persons were hit during the shooting.

After Adebayo lost her job as a cook in Magodo area of Lagos in January 2017, she realised that the easiest option open to her was to become a roadside food vendor in order to fend for her children.

Speaking with Saturday PUNCH, one of her children, Olorunloye Adebayo, narrated that on Tuesday, April 4, 2017, Kudirat was tired and did not want to go out to her stand to fry her snacks at Mushin. But she needed money to feed her children.

”I don’t live with her. Where she lived with my younger siblings is just few metres to the railway station. I went to her place while coming back from work on Tuesday as I usually did. I was hungry and just needed to grab something to eat.

I was surprised that when I got there, she had just started setting up around 3pm. She said she did not start on time because school pupils who usually patronised her were on holiday. Normally, she started frying around midday.

She told me that apart from this, she was very tired but had to force herself to come out because she had no money to take care of the home. I told her that I was broke as well that I even planned to get a soft loan from her.

She told me that my junior brother had just made Amala and that I should go in and eat that.”

Shortly after eating, she left her mum’s place and promised to check in on her again later that day. But that would be the last time he would see her alive.

Olorunloye was in a meeting in the neighbourhood two hours after he saw his mother when he heard a gunshot.

”A neighbourhood security guy in our gathering said that a ‘Yahoo’ boy in the area was celebrating his birthday and that the gunshot must have been part of the celebration. He said we should not panic so we continued the meeting,” he said.

25 minutes later, he received a call that nearly drove him mad. The caller told him that his mother had just been shot dead.

”I could not have imagined that the gunshot I heard 25 minutes earlier that call had anything to do with my mother.

The boys around my mother’s house who witnessed the shooting said that they saw those policemen driving recklessly on their motorcycle (the kind provided to the police by the Lagos State Government for patrol of the metro area).

The two policemen on the motorcycle were well known to youths in the neighbourhood. The rider is called Prince while the passenger who did the shooting is called Chiboy. He is notorious for hunting ‘Yahoo boys’. He arrests and collects money from them before releasing them.

The policemen were chasing the young man from Ogunmokun, few streets away. He was running in zig-zag to avoid being shot. They were shooting at him all the same. An okada rider who was also hit in the leg by one of the bullets survived. He was rushed to the Isolo General Hospital, where the bullet was removed.”

At the police station, however, the matter soon took a different turn.

The family and angry neighbours who had taken the corpse to the Olosan Police Station were told that the policemen could not have shot the deceased as “the bullets the policemen left the station with were all accounted for” by the time they got back.

Then, the police reportedly suggested that she might have been shot by area boys in the neighbourhood.

Seeking justice over the death  of his mum, Olorunloye said:

”The Lagos State Police Command must find the man who took my mother’s life, wherever his colleagues are hiding him. My mother’s blood is crying for justice.

The police have invited poverty and hunger into the lives of my younger ones because my mother was always struggling to take care of them. That bullet did not just kill my mother, it also turned our lives, especially that of my young ones, upside down.

I don’t know what to do with them now. I don’t have money to take care of them. As old as I am, when things became very hard, my mother still gave me money to just help me out.”

Confirming the incident, the spokesperson for the Lagos State Police Command, Olarinde Famous-Cole, said the policemen in question were on an official duty at the time of the incident.

”I cannot say much at this point because investigation is still ongoing on the case. But the men were on an official assignment. The men the policemen were chasing threw the bag they were carrying away and fled. The policemen tried to make sure they stopped the suspects.

We are still investigating what led to the shooting of the woman and as soon as we have more facts, we will make it available.”

WATCH Abayomi, one of the deceased’s son narrate the events.

Photo credit: Punch