Man carrying dead child in Mai Mahiu explains incident

3 days ago, a photo of a man carrying a child on his shoulder elicited sympathy from Kenyans. The scenes were from the flash floods that ravaged the Mai Mahiu area after the River burst its banks.

Speaking to Mururi TV YouTube channel on Wednesday, May 1, the man explained in Kikuyu the frantic efforts to pull bodies out of the mud.

The man named Stephen Njoroge Wambui, and the child is not his.

He described what he does as “Just hustling” as a turn boy working some construction jobs. He told Kenyans willing to help him that he also lost his phone, shoes among other personal effects.

He heard the sounds of people screaming who were being swept away by flash floods at about 2 am.

He was headed to the quarry at the time,

“That child, I found him there and the water was flowing. I was passing there, then I saw the child and I decided to save him from that mud.”

He doesn’t know whose child that was. He rescued many other children stuck in the mud as well.

“I pulled him out, I don’t know the parents. There were others I rescued from that situation. I pulled two other children and a mother, plus a man.”

He said that the four were stranded on a tree. He recalls retrieving 9 bodies after that child.