The arrest of one Brian Kassaine, who is Jacque Maribe’s neighbour has left a Nation Media Group employee wounded and hurt on the digital space.
While the real Brian Kassaine, now in custody, had no traces on the internet, his namesake is a writer at Nation Media with photos, profile and his digital footprints a search engine away.
The 24-year-old writer shares the exact name with a suspect in Monica Kimani’s murder, a man who is being investigated after detectives traced a gun used in a shooting incident on that night to his house.
In an interview with Sunday Nation’s Elvis Ondieki, the journalist revealed that sharing the name with the suspect (Brian Kassaine) had subjected him to cyberbullying, incessant calls, sleepless nights and an anxiety that could not let him work.
Kasaine was forced to visit the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) headquarters on Wednesday to clear his name after local news sites carried his photos in place of those of the real suspect whose name has a double ‘s’.
His photos were circulating on social media that he was the one being investigated by the police and that the gun used by Joe Irungu was found in his house, adjacent to where Jacque Maribe and Mr Irungu live.
“I got the first call at around 8 pm, from one of the members of the Writers’ Guild Kenya. She is in Mombasa. The moment I picked the call, she said, ‘Oh, I’m so happy you’ve picked, because it means you are not the one.’ I was surprised and I asked her what was going on,” recalls the Nation Writer.
Being fresh from campus, his lecturers saw his photos on a local publication and sought to find him. A lecturer called him asking about the arrest that had been reported in several stories with his his photos.
Worse was boiling and awaiting his soft-spoken personality on Twitter. Given that he doubles up as a motivational speaker, Kenyans on Twitter could not have enough of him, thinking he was the real Kassaine.
In a number of the tweets he admits having read, they described him as a murderer by night and motivational speaker by day.
“These criminals engage in murder during the night and motivational talks on entrepreneurship during the day,” read tweet he saw.
Kasaine is an employee of KenyaBuzz, a Nation Media Group product. He intends to get legal redress from a number of media houses that had wrongly placed him in their stories, thinking he was the suspect.