Ms Fridah Harriet, a woman whose search for her father recently went viral on social media, now says she has been informed that her father died depressed plus mentally disturbed.
In her narrative, Ms Harriet who now lives in Holland says her father Mr Zakayo Kinyua, vanished from her life when she was 3 years old.
The family was residing in Meru County at the time. The region is known for its lush green landscapes and vibrant culture but had hidden the pain Ms Harriet has lived with for decades.
It has now emerged that the catalyst for the disappearance from their native home which saw him leave behind his wife and his two daughters was that he was an alcoholic.
Ms Harriet says the mother had hidden the secret from them and as they grew up she never spoke ill of their father.
All these revelations emerged when people who interacted with the father reached out to her and broke the sad news of the kind of life his father led especially after he landed in Nairobi County.
“My parents met way back in the early 80s. They got into the relationship but my father had one weakness, he used to drink alcohol,” she said.
It has also emerged that the father was also brought up by a single mother who later got married to another man.
According to her, the father was the firstborn amongst his step-siblings but he was more like a reject in that family and the stepdad and siblings never accepted him.
Ms Harriet confesses she had already learnt that in as much as the father was a drunkard he was never violent in any way.
The alcohol led to their break-up and the mother decided to leave with her two daughters who she raised until they are now grown women.
Immediately, she posted on Facebook that she was searching for her father, a woman who works at Gikomba market in Nairobi told her she had at some point seen her father who worked as a tailor near her place of work.
“She said at the time she saw the man, he was in a very bad state, having been ravaged by alcohol,” Ms Harriet said.
However, what made her believe that indeed the man was her father is that the trader at Gikomba told her he was a slight stammer, a detail which the mother as well accepted as positive.
According to her, the mother also said the last time she met with their father was in 2017 and this even made Ms Harriet very happy that she was about to meet the father.
On the evening of Sunday, August 20, 2023, another man contacted Ms Harriet who then broke the sad news to her that her father died after going through predicaments.
The man said he lived with her father in Mlango Kubwa Area within Starehe Sub-County in Nairobi.
The man told Ms Harriet that in 2019, the father had tried to go back to their native home with the aim of getting an inheritance and he was completely rejected.
It is then that he left back to Nairobi and delved more into alcoholism in a manner that he had never.
Mr Kinyua then went into depression and finally had a mental breakdown- next, he entered street life before he started collecting litter in the streets and sleeping in the garbage and draining.
In 2020, when the country was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, he could no longer stand the wrath leading to his death in one of the streets in Eastleigh, Kamkunji Sub-County in Nairobi.
The body was identified by friends. It was collected by police as an unclaimed body and buried where no one knows.
