Lofa – Boweh Koifee, the 24-year-old arrested by police in August for murdering her one-day-old male child in Lofa County might just go scot free due to what health authorities in that part of the country have attributed to the murderer’s state of mental instability at the time of the commission of the crime.
Quoting family members of the 24-year-old, the Lofa County Health Team’s mental health division reports that prior to allegedly murdering the infant, Boweh had been suffering from depression or major depressive disorder, which is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act.
Depression causes feelings of sadness and/or a loss of interest in activities once enjoyed, but fortunately, according to medical research, it is also treatable.
PUNCH reported in August that police in Lofa County had disclosed that Boweh, a mother of three, had killed her baby in that part of the country.
Boweh admitted to the commission of the crime, confessing to police investigators that she murdered the child because she was abandoned by her husband, who she claims left her in the name of finding a contract for their survival.
In an attempt to save the bleeding child at the time, community residents who discovered the newborn baby lying in a pool of his own blood in a bucket after he was stabbed by his mother, immediately rushed him at the Nyandimoilahun Health Center for medical care, but the child died later while being attended to by health workers at the health center.
Police in Kolahun, Lofa, charged Boweh with murder and arraigned her in court at the Tenth Judicial Circuit Court in Voinjama, Lofa, but she was later released, upon appeal from family members to the court, for the 24-year-old to seek herbal treatment for her mental illness.
A medical report from Lofa County’s mental health team, also corroborates assertions from family members of Boweh that she is mentally inbalanced but several Lofa citizens who spoke to PUNCH on the issue, expressed the belief that it is a clever attempt employed to make the 24-year-old to escape justice.
Several persons have condemned Boweh for murdering the infant; with many others demanding that the 24-year-old must be made to pay for what they described as her evil act against an innocent child.
Some citizens of Nyandimoilahun Town, indicated that they are of the conviction that Boweh has another reason or reasons for murdering the child, other than what she has said, adding that she will have to explain the actual reason for committing such heinous crime.
Human Rights Actors in the Lofa County are however, calling for an advance medical examination to be conducted on the 24-year-old, who is said to have returned to Nyandimoilahun Town , from where she was taken to seek herbal treatmnt.
