Lynn man kills mother of his kids

LYNN – Patrick Waweru stabbed Esther Kinyanjui to death Monday night after convincing her to travel to Lynn from Delaware with their children then holding her hostage before she almost escaped from him.Waweru, 28, of Lynn will be arraigned in District Court today after spending Tuesday in Union Hospital where he was taken Monday night after taking a pill overdose.Police arrested him late Tuesday after questioning him in the hospital.The 31-year-old mother of girls, ages 4 and 1, died at North Shore Medical Center in Salem from knife wounds to the neck. Waweru hit Kinyanjui’s sister, Margaret, on the head with a heavy board shortly after 10 p.m. before stabbing Kinyanjui in the basement of 130 Adams St.”I fell down. My sister pulled him from me. I had a chance to escape. My mother saw him stab twice, one on the right side of her neck, then the left, then he slit her throat,” Margaret Kinyanjui said.Their mother, Ruth, suffered hand wounds attempting to stop Waweru.The attack capped off Waweru’s hours-long abduction of Kinyanjui and marked the climax of a relationship between the pair that included domestic violence charges filed against each other in court.Margaret Kinyanjui said Waweru convinced her sister to come to Lynn last Saturday with daughters Precious and Maryanne, claiming he needed her help resolving a court case.The couple met Sunday and again Monday when Margaret Kinyanjui said Waweru bound and gagged Esther Kinyanjui.”He was threatening to kill her. My sister begged him to let her go.”Kinyanjui is not sure if Waweru held her sister hostage in his 4 Kingsley Terrace residence, but the pair arrived at Margaret Kinyanjui’s Adams Street home shortly after 9:30 p.m. Monday and Esther Kinyanjui convinced him to let her go into the house to speak to her sister and mother.”My mom said, ‘Call the police,’ but Esther said, ‘It’s worse to call the police.’ After five or 10 minutes he was yelling outside, ‘Where’s my phone?’ I was trying to call people to help us,” Margaret Kinyanjui said.She said Waweru then forced his way through the door to the basement room where the three women were talking.Kinyanjui and Waweru immigrated from the African nation of Kenya and met, according to Margaret Kinyanjui, at a Malden church in 2000.Esther Kinyanjui filed a restraining order in Lynn District Court against Waweru on August 22, 2000, claiming he threatened and hit her after he insisted she place photographs of him in the living room of an apartment where they were living as roommates.”The following morning I got home and I found him waiting for me to beat me up again,” she wrote in the order.She vacated the restraining order a month later.Waweru has a court record that included a 2002 disorderly conduct charge, a 2003 charge of assault and battery and a charge this year of operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol.He was scheduled to appear in Ipswich District Court today on a license suspension related to the drunk driving charge.In 2004 and 2005, Waweru filed restraining orders in Lynn District Court against Kinyanjui, claiming in the more recent case that she broke into his former Walnut Street apartment on Jan. 3, 2005 while he was in Michigan and stole a couch and a laptop computer worth $2,900.”She also has threatened my new roommate, Grace, whom she thinks I’ve a relationship with,” he wrote in the order.Waweru and Kinyanjui subsequently agreed to have the case dismissed.Kinyanjui, according to her sister, earned a nursing degree at North Shore Community College in 2004 and worked at Salem Hospital and Peabody Glen nursing home before moving in June to Delaware where she worked as a nurse.