Residents of Mutamaiyo in Elburgon, Nakuru County, were left in shock after waking up to a casket and cross dumped outside one of the neighbouring homes on Thursday.
The incident equally left the villagers in deep thought, as hundreds of onlookers watched from afar fearing that the cask may have a dead body.
It took the intervention of local administrators, led by Mutamaiyo Location Chief Bethuel Kibe, to open the casket in a bid to determine if it was empty or not. KIbe found the casket empty.
The chief and fellow officers later established that the casket had been dumped there by the kin of one Ruth Wamaitha, in protest to the home owner's inability to repay a debt.
“Ruth Wamaitha had given the homeowner Sh150,000 but she had only been repaid Sh75,000 and the rest defaulted. The two came to my office and we spoke about the matter. Unfortunately, Wamaitha died before it was concluded,” he said.
He said that Wamaitha, who recently died, had ordered that the same is done should she die before the debt is fully settled, hence her family's decision to make the move.
He added that the body was to be buried on Wednesday, but the function postponed to Thursday, but her family did not collect her body at the morgue.
Instead, he said, they took the coffin to the defaulter's home. He defended them as merely following the directives handed down by the deceased before her demise.
“She had a lot of anger towards the defaulter despite having an agreement on how the money was to be repaid. Her family members are only following her instructions. She had actually intended to have her body brought to the home which was shocking to me too,” added Kibe.
However, the defaulter was not home at the time, having left for her second home in Kuresoi, with the chief bashing the late Wamaitha's family for causing anxiety in the village.