17-year-old goes missing on resumption day at Enugu private university

Chiedozie Azuike

Chiedozie Azuike, a 17-year-old who recently gained admission into a private university in Enugu state, has been declared missing. Punch reports that Chiedozie went missing on the day he was to resume in the school.

The distraught mum of the missing undergraduate, Maureen Azuike, says she believes that her son was hypnotised because strange things had been happening around him before his disapperance. She said Chiedozie left her house on Monday with the intention of going to school to resume. She however returned home and found his phone, the money she gave him and also his school documents at home. When she called the school to find out if he was there, she was informed he was not in school.

“After paying the necessary fees, I begged his former lesson teacher to help me take him to the school since I was busy. The teacher had previously taken him to the school for registration on two occasions and December 4 was when he was supposed to resume in the university finally. I had told the teacher that he would help us to take him to the school and he said there was no problem.
“On Monday night when I got back from work, I told Chiedozie to get his things ready that he would be going to school the next morning with his teacher. He asked me the time the teacher would be coming and I told him to get ready by 7am.
“He had been at home all this while and he usually slept all day and watched TV at night; so, that night, I discovered that he was not sleeping as usual and I told him to go and sleep because of the journey he would embark on in the morning.”
When I wanted to do a change of course for him, he said he had lost his SIM card, so I gave him my second SIM so that he could put it in a phone that had been at home all this while. That morning, I gave him the SIM and the sum of N10,000 to spend for the week; I also gave him extra N15,000 wrapped in a paper to give to the teacher so that he would use it to buy provisions for him when they get to Enugu since I didn’t have the time to buy them for him.
“Around 7.30am, I left the house and I told him to wait for his teacher; his other siblings were also at home that day. At about 9.20am, the teacher called me that he was in our house waiting for my son and that his siblings told him that Chiedozie had gone out with his bag. I was surprised because I told him to wait for the teacher; so, the teacher suggested that he would go and check the two parks that they use whenever they travelled together. One is the Peace Park and the second one is the ITC. He went to the two parks and called me that he did not see him.”

Panicking, she called the school and was told he had not reported. When she got home, she found the money she gave to him and his phone with all his call logs deleted.

“The next day, I called the school again and they said they had not seen him, so I went to the police station and the fire service station in Owerri and the person I met at the police station just took my statement and said the officer who would handle the case would call me in the morning. A woman called me on Thursday morning and I went to the station to see her and I gave her his passport photograph and wrote  a statement on what happened.
The next day, I was asked to bring N15,000 so as to enable them send signals to all the police stations in the state. I noticed that someone had used a sharp object to tear my children’s window a few weeks before Chiedozie went missing and the children alerted me to it. I believed he was manipulated out of the house even though I used to quarrel with him if he did something wrong. He didn’t have any friend, but two months ago, he told me that he closed his Facebook account, and I asked him why, but he said nothing, but I think some people were disturbing him there. I think he was manipulated out of the house because of the recent occurrence in my house of people flashing light into my room and my children’s room net being torn with a sharp object.”

The matter has since been reported to the police.