Violent Death For Abusive Father

[Dhimbil]

 

Dr. Joseph Z. Kazigo, top, was killed last year. Mulumba Kazigo, bottom, one of Dr. Kazigo's sons, is charged with the crime.

 

SOMERS, N.Y. - Dr. Joseph Z. Kazigo enjoyed all the trappings of the American dream: a pale yellow colonial-style house here with a stream out back; a career as an emergency-room surgeon; seven grown children, two of them West Point graduates. So when the bedroom of his Long Island apartment was found slicked with blood after his family reported him missing, his friends and colleagues were horrified.

 

More horror would follow.

 

Within days, the police arrested his son Mulumba, 26, a quiet, seemingly gentle student at the State University at Albany. The police say he confessed to killing his father, and led a group of investigators to the body, which was wrapped in plastic bags and hidden in underbrush by a reservoir near the family home in northern Westchester County.

 

The story did not end with Mulumba Kazigo's arrest, however. As he has waited in the Nassau County jail since late August, held without bail on charges of second-degree murder, his family has rallied around him, waging a campaign to explain the son's actions by depicting the father as a brute.

 

The siblings have described a household in which they lived in fear of their father's return home on weekends. (During the week, Dr. Kazigo, 67, stayed in his apartment near Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow, where he worked the night shift.)

 

They have told of beatings for infractions as slight as putting sugar on cereal. They have described how Dr. Kazigo shoved the head of one of his daughters through a window and then stitched up her cuts without anesthesia. They also attribute the mental illness of four of the children, including Mulumba, to what they say was the father's cruelty.

 

"Dr. Kazigo was a very troubled man and led two lives," said Steven J. Chaikin, Mulumba Kazigo's lawyer. "He had a life during the week at the hospital where he was admired by his colleagues and was apparently a very good surgeon. Then he went home occasionally and really did some awful things to his kids and to Caroline," his wife.

 

Mr. Chaikin said that Mrs. Kazigo did not take part in the abuse of the children. She herself was abused, he said, although it was more often psychological than physical.

 

Mrs. Kazigo declined to answer questions. "The more I talk, the more I get depressed with the issue," she said when reached by phone. "Enough is enough. It's so painful. This is a tragic death."

 

Mulumba Kazigo has pleaded not guilty. Mr. Chaikin is considering various legal strategies, including a so-called battered child defense and one based on Mulumba's mental status at the time of the killing.

 

But prosecutors have dismissed the idea that the son was defending himself. They have called the murder a "sneak attack," contending that the son killed Dr. Kazigo as he slept on the morning of Aug. 24 by bludgeoning him with a baseball bat and slitting his throat with a knife.

 

"Unfortunately for the defendant, any abuse in this case is a motive for doing what he did," said Eric Phillips, a spokesman for the Nassau County district attorney's office. "It certainly isn't self-defense. He wasn't currently in a fight with his father. He planned a murder ahead of time and executed it."

 

A native of Uganda, Dr. Kazigo came to the United States in the early 1960's. He was active among Ugandan immigrants, helping to found a local chapter of Gwanga Mujje, a group promoting social and economic development in the Buganda kingdom of Uganda.

 

As a surgeon, Dr. Kazigo earned the respect of colleagues, first at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx and more recently at Nassau University Medical Center.

 

"At any time in the last 20 years, if you took a poll at the hospital and asked, who is the most highly thought of doctor, he would probably be named," said a former colleague, Dr. Sam P. Kigongo, a trauma surgeon at Lincoln.

 

Dr. Kigongo socialized with Dr. Kazigo outside of the hospital, but said he rarely saw him at home. He described his demeanor at the hospital as "very formal and strict," but said he never heard him raise his voice.

 

But according to Mr. Chaikin, who said he had talked to all seven children and Mrs. Kazigo, Dr. Kazigo raised more than his voice at home. Much of the information came from the oldest daughter, a West Point graduate who is now an Army doctor stationed in Hawaii. "When he came home, he tortured his kids," Mr. Chaikin said bluntly.

 

Mulumba's older brother, Gabe, gave an interview to Newsday in September in which he described several examples of abuse. Family members declined to be interviewed for this article, preferring to let Mr. Chaikin speak for them.

 

The cereal episode was recounted in harrowing detail by Gabe, as well as other siblings, Mr. Chaikin said. In the mid-1980's, after the siblings made the mistake of putting sugar on their breakfast cereal, the father made all seven children, then ages 2 to 12, take off their clothes and lie face down on the living-room floor, Mr. Chaikin said.

 

The father then stepped on their heads and beat their backs with a tree branch until they bled, Mr. Chaikin said. Then each child was ordered to say "thank you" and sent upstairs to listen to the others' screams.

 

Another punishment involved a young son, Lwanga, whose wrists were tied to the overhead pipes in the basement, Mr. Chaikin said. He was then beaten with a stick. "It's a real tragedy," Mr. Chaikin said. "Some days, he would have the kids go get a stick themselves."

 

Mr. Chaikin also related how the father once thrust the head of his daughter Bernadette, then 15, through a glass window. "What does Dr. Kazigo do?" he said. "He can't have her go to a hospital because this is an obvious abuse, and he sews it up himself without any anesthetic."

 

Over the years, Mulumba Kazigo attempted suicide several times, Mr. Chaikin said.

 

But some look upon the abuse allegations skeptically, wondering why they did not surface earlier.

 

Francis M. Ssekandi, an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School who went to school with Dr. Kazigo in Uganda, said he had no specific knowledge of the nature of discipline in the Kazigo home. But he said he doubted that it was so extreme that it could lead to murder.

 

"In Uganda, many of the successful people who have been able to go to school have had tough parents," he said. "Those kids were not successful for nothing. I wouldn't dispute that he was a disciplinarian with his kids, but if it had been so bad, I would expect it to have been brought up in the community."

 

As the children grew into adults, the beatings became less frequent, and at least two of the sons, including Mulumba, started to resist, Mr. Chaikin said.

 

Last year, when Dr. Kazigo made a move to beat Mulumba in the head with a book, for instance, Mulumba pushed him, the lawyer said.

 

On the night of Aug. 25, Dr. Kazigo's colleagues grew alarmed after he failed to show up for work. A member of the hospital staff alerted the doctor's family in Somers; Mulumba, in turn, called the local precinct on Long Island to report the father missing.

 

"An officer was dispatched, and while we were at the apartment, Mulumba made a number of additional calls and asked what was going on," said Detective. Lt. Dennis Farrell of the Nassau County Police Homicide Squad.

 

At the back of the house in Westbury where Dr. Kazigo rented an apartment, the police found a glass door shattered. Inside, a trail of blood led upstairs. "There was a tremendous amount of blood in the bedroom," Lieutenant Farrell said. "The blood spatter evidence was indicative of multiple strikes. There was no way that the victim could have left on his own."

 

None of the neighbors heard anything unusual, but one reported seeing a young black man outside the house on the morning of Aug. 24 and then saw someone backing a white car up into the driveway.

 

When detectives arrived in Somers at 1 a.m. on Aug. 26, they spotted a white car on the family's property on Route 202. "The trunk was open and it appeared that someone had tried to clean it out," Lieutenant Farrell said. "The detectives smelled the distinctive smell of death in the trunk."

 

Mulumba Kazigo told detectives that he had taken the car, which belonged to a brother, to visit his father on the morning of Aug 24, Lieutenant Farrell said. He made a number of incriminating statements during the drive to Nassau County, and at police headquarters he confessed to killing his father before leading investigators to the body back in Westchester, the lieutenant said.

 

Mr. Chaikin said Dr. Kazigo "triggered" Mulumba's attack, but refused to be more specific. "Mulumba was driven to act to prevent what he quite reasonably felt would have spelled disaster for his mom and or himself and his siblings," he said.

 

Despite the family's support for Mulumba, there is also profound sadness for the father. At the funeral in early September, one daughter, Dr. Nakizito Kazigo of Hawaii, gave an emotional elegy, describing him as strict but kind, according to an account in The Journal News, which covers Westchester. Mulumba asked for permission to attend the funeral, but a judge denied it.

 

"When I talk to the family, I don't say what a monster Daddy was," Mr. Chaikin said. "This family does support Mulumba. They know why he did what he did. But there's a lot of love there. It's strange, and it's painful to listen to. Even Mulumba was torn."

 

Source

[Cara.]

Wow. And I thought my family had problems.

[Khayr]

Menandez brothers-thats what comes to mind.

 

SubhanAllah, what a FITNAH for the family.

 

A Dunya maalcuuna (the world is cursed)

[Dhimbil]

"Some days, he would have the kids go get a stick themselves."

^This reminded me of Somalia. I hope we don't find ourselves in that situation but I worry for these violent kids in the west.