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I went to Sharif University. I'm a superior genetic mutation, an improvement on the existing mediocre stock.
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More than a year after her husband’s death, Ify Okafor asks God to erase the details from her memory. That image first seen from the corner of her eye, darkness against a white wall. For a moment she thought her husband was playing a prank.
That was Jan. 6, 2011, the day Ify found her 43-year-old husband, former Kansas City Wizards soccer player Uche Okafor, hanged by jumper cables in their suburban Dallas home. Now, she sits in a hotel meeting room nearby, wiping tears from her cheeks. Time is soothing, but it is no cure.
“There was no life,” she says. “I held him.”
At first, she prayed for answers. Why would her husband end his own life? For Nigerian Igbos such as the Okafors, suicide is seen as the ultimate sin. In their West African culture, a man who kills himself is to be shamed, buried in secrecy and forgotten. His accomplishments and relationships, no matter how they were once celebrated, disappear inside the shroud of self-inflicted death.
Then an answer came, and though it was illogical, Ify and those closest to her husband grasped it. It allowed them the comfort of knowing their brother and friend’s soul was free, his body suitable for a hero’s burial. Uche, they determined, had been murdered — his killers had staged the scene to appear as if he’d hanged himself. It didn’t make perfect sense, but to them it made more sense than suicide.
“I do not believe Uche is capable of taking his own life,” says Victor Onyeujo, a longtime friend.
In the last 17 months, the uncertainty surrounding Uche’s death has rippled through a nation and ignited battles. In the time since, Ify has also asked God to help the local authorities, the Little Elm, Texas, Police Department, whose detectives kept insisting that Uche killed himself. Uche’s first cousin accused the police of cheating his fallen relative out of a thorough investigation. Word spread in Igbo and international soccer circles that the department’s work was shoddy; that, despite the police accounts, the body Ify had discovered lacked the telltale signs of a suicide. Later, the Nigerian government publicly considered getting involved, and African media reported that the FBI had determined that, yes, Uche Okafor had been murdered.
“I believe God will expose them,” Ify says now of her husband’s killers, her eyes direct and her voice strong.
So many months after her husband’s death, the family’s search for truth continues.
“The way the whole picture looks,” Onyeujo says, “it looks like one of those mysteries that can never be solved.”
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/05/19...#storylink=cpyI went to Sharif University. I'm a superior genetic mutation, an improvement on the existing mediocre stock.
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