The family of a 30-year-old Kenyan woman fatally stabbed inside a Scarborough Junction apartment earlier this week said bringing her body back home will bring some closure to a tragedy.
Lorraine Kerubo Ogoti was pronounced dead on Tuesday afternoon after being found suffering from life-threatening injuries inside an apartment building located at 544 Birchmount Road, south of St. Clair Avenue East.
“I can’t believe I’m having this interview because it feels so final,” her sister Linda Oduor said while speaking with CTV News Toronto on Friday from her home in the United States. “This honestly comes as such a shock. It hurts, it’s confusing and it’s a tough pill to swallow.”
“She was bubbly. She was not an introvert, she was really warm, she was friendly and she was just someone who loved people, loved the concept of family and loved to get together with people and make new friends and that’s actually why she went to Canada.”
Oduor said her sister moved to Toronto about a year ago in the hopes of figuring out a steady career path. Ogoti was trying out new temporary jobs while living in the city. While Ogoti was staying in Toronto, Oduor said she did not know her exact address.
“She was very silent about her personal life,” Oduor said. “She was very secretive.”
“I always respected her space because she’s always been that type of person to keep her personal life to herself.”
When officers found Ogoti at the apartment building, they also located a 40-year-old man suffering from life-threatening injuries on the ground outside. The man –identified by police at Mowlid Hassan – was also pronounced dead at the scene and his cause of death has since been determined to be blunt force trauma.
Investigators said they are not looking for any other suspects in connection with this case.
“There’s still a lot of questions and there is still a lot of unanswered things that we do not understand but at this moment we are just trying to put things together and give us a finally journey back home – the intention is to take her back home where we can mourn the loss and just grieve with the family,” Oduor said.
Oduor and Ogoti’s parents live in Kenya and are taking care of Ogoti’s four-year-old son Moses. Oduor said the family has not yet told the young boy what happened to his mother.
“He doesn’t really know what is going on since he is very young but he has noticed that a lot of people are home,” Oduor said. “All he wonders is why everyone is so quiet and he wonders why his grandmother is always crying.”
Oduor said she has been receiving information from Toronto police regarding the case and passing it along to her family in Kenya.
“It’s been very difficult, especially with my dad to take phone calls and have to relay this information because he is back in Africa and the time zones are different so just telling him what happened has been really hard and especially when I had to wait on information from the police department so whatever little information I got is what I relayed back home.”
Before bringing Ogoti’s body back home to Kenya, her sister said she wants to travel to Toronto to “just see her and just be there where everything happened – just for closure.”
