Domestic Tragedy: How a Woman Beat Her 10-year-old Housegirl to Death in Lagos

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Domestic Tragedy: How a Woman Beat Her 10-year-old Housegirl to Death in Lagos

For allegedly beating her 10-year-old housemaid, Joy Mbafan, to death in the Ikorodu area of Lagos state, a middle-aged woman identified as Linda Alapa, has been arrested by operatives of the Nigerian Police.

According to a report by Punch Metro, Alapa was flogging the girl for a misdemeanor around 3:00am last Monday when she passed out and died afterwards in her home at Bolanle Oduniyi Street, Okegbegun, Ikorodu.

At the Ikorodu General Hospital morgue where she had gone to deposit Mbafan’s corpse, a doctor on duty was said to have noticed marks of violence on the body and alerted the police at the Sagamu Road Division.

Speaking to a correspondent, a police source disclosed that after interrogation, Alapa confessed to beating the girl, adding that she would be charged with murder.

“She wanted to absolve herself of the death of the victim, but for the doctor on duty who raised the alarm after a close examination and she was arrested. There are marks of violence on the body of the deceased and she did not deny beating her.”

Also speaking to a reporter, some residents of Bolanle Oduniyi Street, on Wednesday, said they had warned her many times to desist from assaulting the victim to no avail.

A neighbour of the suspect said Alapa did not only beat the girl but also starved her of food, adding that although she did not know what led to the beating on that day, “she usually beat the girl for messing up their apartment.”

The woman, who gave her name only as Ellen, said: “Around 3am on the day the girl died, I heard her crying as the woman (Alapa) flogged her. I woke up my husband to intervene. He said he was tired of the woman’s insults. After a while, she stopped crying.

“It was when I came back from work that afternoon that I saw a crowd on our premises in tears. They said Joy (Mbafan) was dead. The woman’s husband was not at home that day. It was the landlord that told him about the incident on the telephone.”

Another resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the girl’s father was late while her mother was ill, adding that Alapa had brought her to Lagos from a village in the eastern part of Nigeria.

“But she used to beat up and starve the girl of food. On several occasions, the girl would come to me to eat, saying her aunty did not give her food.”