- When police arrived at the scene, they realised the room she spent in, which also served as a short-stay accommodation, was locked.
- The man, who was identified as Lawrence Gitonga, had bled profusely, prompting the team to rush him to hospital but under watch.
Image: The Star
Detectives are holding a 33-year-old man who was found with stab wounds in a room where a 20-year-old woman had been before she fell off to her death in Thome area, Kasarani, Nairobi.
The body of Joan Mbula, 20, was Saturday found on the ground floor of an apartment she had spent the previous night.
She was half naked and was only wearing a red tshirt, at the time the body fell off the tenth floor of the White House apartments.
It is not clear if she was pushed out of the room, was running away or died by suicide, police said.
When police arrived at the scene, they realised the room she spent in, which also served as a short-stay accommodation, was locked.
The team contacted the owner of the room who arrived with a spare.
Therein, they found an unconscious man lying on the floor with stab wounds.
The man, who was identified as Lawrence Gitonga, had bled profusely, prompting the team to rush him to hospital but under watch.
He told police Mbula stabbed him.
The room looked disturbed which indicated there had been a struggle.
Neighbours told police they heard the woman shouting for help at the balcony of the house before she fell off.
The DCI officers spent the better part of Saturday morning combing through evidence and interviewing residents and management of the apartment.
The officers are trying to unravel what transpired with pictures from the house showing bloody bedsheets and blood splattered on the bathroom walls and floor.
Gitonga is nursing eight stab wounds.
They suspect the man may have sought refuge in the bathroom after he was stabbed.
Detectives are keen to get answers on what transpired leading to the death of the woman.
The deceased according to police had no wounds.
A postmortem is however planned to tell how she died.
Detectives are trying to unravel the 3am incident that happened in one of the more than 200 units of the building that is both a residential and has temporary stay apartments.
The investigating officers collected forensic evidence, and personal belongings and secured CCTV footage that will help in their investigations.
Police said they had established the woman met the man in one of the entertainment joints along Mirema Drive in Roysambu on Friday night.
Hours later, they were seen dropping off one of their friends before heading to the White House apartments and later to a bar close to the apartments where they continued drinking inside a car. Around 3 am Saturday, the two checked into the short-stay apartment they had booked on the 10th floor.
Nairobi police boss Adamson Bungei said they are waiting for Gitonga to stabilise to tell his story as part of the probe into the murder.
“For now, he is the main suspect in this incident as we investigate it,” he said.