Moses Ayetoro lost his life last January after he stood in front of a B7 double-decker bus for way longer than intended.
For hours, police investigators said, Moses had stood in front of the car with his wife and children in the back seat. They believed that the driver was coasting down the Lagos highway with him in front of him. And they were entirely right.
Moses was killed instantly.
He was born four months premature and weighed just under 3 pounds, according to his sister, who was walking beside him when he died. But “shy” didn’t do justice to his former glory.
“Oh Moses, u carried me in ur arms from my house to God. My heart & soul are mourning with U tonight,” Penice Ayetoro wrote on Facebook two days after her brother’s death. “He died in my arms.”
Penice Ayetoro said her brother had been “very polite.”
The graphic details of what happened that night — young children and the wife of a man killed by the speeding car — has continued to haunt Moses’s family for two months now.
Penice Ayetoro found the image of her dead brother lying in the street, bleeding and lifeless, on the morning of January 13, 2018.
“I took off early from my office that morning to visit him. I found him lying on the tarmac from the bridge to Mainland Barracks. I asked the police what happened and they gave me an unusual story,” she told Nigerian news site, Sweet Earth.
“They told me the driver saw me and he decided to take the police to me by forcing his way through one of the lanes. They said I was in the middle of the road; this made the police to decide to shoot him instead of shouting at me to move out of the way.”
Police claimed that Moses Ayetoro climbed “on top of the bus” and laid down in front of the car.
“I called Moses’s name, which means God in Yoruba,” Penice said. “He breathed his last in my arms.”
Penice Ayetoro went to the Chief Superintendent of Police in charge of the Bayside Division in Lagos and reported what had happened.
“In the process of my communication, the Police Commissioner-in-crisis came to the station,” she told Sweet Earth. “But he told the Superintendent ‘I’m sorry that it’s your son.’”
While Moses Ayetoro’s case is still being investigated, police have apologized for their actions and announced a new procedure to protect pedestrians.
“I received an apology from the Police Commissioner,” Penice Ayetoro said. “I don’t want this kind of incident to happen again and I also asked the Inspector General of Police to investigate my son’s death. We have asked for justice and so we still wait for that.”
She said she never stopped thinking about her son’s death and her mood has only “deteriorated” since last January.
Read the full story at Sweet Earth.
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