From Magnus Eze, Enugu
Four years after 30-year-old Mrs. Nnenna Usulor, from Ezza Obeagu community in Ishielu Local Government Area of Ebonyi State, died, her distraught husband, Friday Usulor, has not had rest. The widower believes that the soul of his late wife has not been at peace, too. So, he has appealed to people to allow her spirit some deserved rest.
Nnenna had reportedly taken her life at Smiles Specialist Hospital, Eguogboriga, Abakaliki, Ebonyi State, where she worked as a cleaner, on January 5, 2017, following a protracted mental disorder.
Usulor is up against some faceless persons raising issues about his wife’s death, claiming that she was murdered at the hospital, of actually tormenting him and further compounding his woes.
He described a petition purportedly written by Chief Nwamkpume Sylvester and five unmentioned others on behalf of the Usulor family to the Minister of State for Health, Sen. Olorunmimbe Mamora, which alleged that his wife was murdered in Smiles Specialist Hospital, Abakaliki, as fictitious.
According to him, the sole purpose of the faceless petitioners was to further “frustrate me and tarnish the image of Smiles Specialist Hospital, which employed my late wife for the purpose of helping her to recover from manifest mental depressive mood that kept her sleepless for over two years before she eventually killed herself.”
Insisting that his wife’s employers had no hand in her death but have become victim of circumstance they knew nothing about, Usulor pronounced curses on the authors of the said petition, praying for God to visit them and their generations with the very affliction that led to the death of his wife, in vindication of the innocent “as the writers have decided to cause me further emotional pains and psychological trauma without cause.”
The widower believes that those behind the petition, which he termed blackmail, were using the circumstantial death of his wife for pecuniary benefits.
“I am properly seized with the facts and circumstances that led to her demise, hence, I will stop at nothing in entering court action against any persons who continue to politicise my wife’s death in any guise and for whatsoever reason,” he warned.
Travails of the Usulors
Usulor told Daily Sun that they never enjoyed their marriage for a single day, from May 24, 2014, when they became husband and wife. Armed with medical records of the deceased’s protracted illness until she reportedly died by her own hands, he recalled that Nnenna was afflicted with various strange ailments, which further degenerated into acute mental disorder for which she was managed by the psychiatry department of the Alex Ekwueme Federal Teaching Hospital (AE-FETHA), Abakaliki, with hospital file number 062384.
In his letter dated March 23, 2019, addressed to the Minister of State for Health, drawing the attention of the director, Hospital Services, Federal Ministry of Health, Usulor reaffirmed that his wife died by her own hands, as against some spurious publications insinuating murder, with the caption: “Community demands justice for slain daughter.”
Amid tears, he emphasized that, “It was even when she seemed recovering from the mental illness that the psychiatric doctors that managed her illness at AE-FETHA warned me never to leave her lonely or alone to avoid her suffering deeper depression that might degenerate and further lead her to commit suicide.
“I approached the management of the Smiles Specialist Hospital, Abakaliki, and pleaded for a mild job that would suit her sporadic mental trauma, which she sometimes exhibits. I was forced by her health status to intimate the management of Smiles Specialist Hospital of her mental health ordeal so that they would know the nature of hospital duty she might be assigned to perform. By this time, she was still on drugs for her psychiatric sickness; she resumed work, until the time she took her own life.”
He said, though the hospital management had hesitated in engaging his wife, his determined passionate appeal that employing her would eliminate her idleness and chances of her suffering worse depression led to her eventual employment as a cleaner there on compassionate grounds.
Usulor further disclosed that his wife had at some point confided in him how she had made secret attempts to take her life out of insistent depression resulting from her health condition.
“She went to work with the said knife and a yam packaged by me (her husband) because I wanted her to stay at the hospital (her office) for some days as I travelled,” he said.
He added that Nnenna’s sudden unnatural death was subsequently reported to the police and the law enforcement agents carried out diligent investigations and formally directed the AE-FETHA to carry out necessary autopsy on her corpse. He said that the AE-FETHA coroner’s expert discovery reaffirmed that his wife killed herself.
He brandished a copy of the autopsy report allegedly issued by the coroner, including the warrant to bury, dated January 9, 2017.
Usulor lamented that over two years after the burial of his late wife, some faceless persons unknown to both him and his in-laws used fictitious names to concoct serial petitions to the police and other government agencies.
He said: “The unfounded allegations that the police at both Ebonyi State Command and the Calabar zone six command swept the circumstance of the death of my wife under the carpet is misleading, incisive and maliciously fabricated towards achieving personal selfish and political interest best known to them: “The police did fully investigate the death of my late wife as reported by the management of Smiles Specialist Hospital, all heads and staff of the hospital were investigated, arrested, interrogated and detained till the autopsy report came out and eventually revealed that it was a case of self-murder.
“Thereupon, the police, in the exercise of their lawful duty, released all the arrested persons, not only based on my statement, but based on the expert findings of the pathologists and coroner’s findings as well.”
Most worrisome to the widower was that the so-called petitioners even wrote to the Commissioner of Police, Ebonyi State, using his name and claiming that he had called for proper investigation of the circumstances surrounding his wife’s death. This prompted the police to invite him, only to discover that he had no knowledge of the petitions.
Daily Sun learnt that the late Nnenna was a patient of the Department of Psychiatry at the Federal Teaching Hospital, Abakaliki, where she was managed for “severe depression and psychotic symptoms.” She was reportedly admitted into the ward on April 24, 2014, for in-patient management.
However, she allegedly absconded from the ward after about 13 days but continued visiting the clinic as an out-patient. She was said to have been stable, until she stopped her clinic visits on August 16, 2016.
Usulor stated categorically that neither he nor any member of Ezza Obeagu community ever delegated any person to petition on their behalf.
Widower’s burden
Usulor has appealed to the police to use its intelligence skills to unravel the fictitious petitioners and bring them to book. In a letter to the Commissioner of Police, through his counsel, Onugha Onugha, he urged the police boss to cause “prompt and proper investigation to be carried out on the writers of the fictitious petition and publication, with a view to disclosing and arresting the actual identities of persons that are writing the petitions in the name of our client, as their actions are not only continuously reminding our client of the death of his wife, which is causing him unfathomable emotional distress, but also our client now lives in fear of such faceless entities as nobody can predict their purpose/target for such busybody undertakings.”
He also advised his traducers to apologise to him in the national dailies “for trying to dip their finger in my already healing wound, else, they will face 10 times what I passed through because of my late wife.”
However, the management of Smiles Specialist Hospital declined to speak on the issue but, rather, referred our correspondent to the police.
The police in Ebonyi State said that the State CIID duly investigated a case of suspected murder of Mrs. Nnenna Usulor and confirmed that the postmortem examination report revealed that the deceased inflicted injuries on herself, which led to her untimely death.
They added that the remains of the deceased had since been buried at her place, Ezza Obeagu, in Ishielu LGA.
