On December 17, Oluwatosin Onadipe, a 30-year-old recent graduate of Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), popularly known as ‘Peckulia’, went to Ago Iwoye Park, also known as Chips Park, to preach the gospel, but he would never return home alive.

Eyewitnesses who contacted his parents revealed that a man, now identified as a former chairman of the park, struck him with a rod on his head, which caused him to bleed to death.

Raymond Onadipe, Oluwatosin’s father, told FIJ that by the time he learned of his son’s tragedy, it was too late, as Oluwatosin had already been buried beside a road, far from his residence in Ago Iwoye.

Onadipe said that before his son’s passing, a younger brother of the deceased tried to reach out to him but he did not take his calls. He continued to call until December 22, when a Hausa man answered the phone.

According to Onadipe, when he met with the Hausa man on December 23, he claimed that his boys found the phone on the ground in Ode, Ogun State.

“Before I went to see the Hausa man, I went to the police station in Ago and reported the case. So, the police and I went to see him. When we saw the Hausa man, he explained that his boys went to Ijebu Ijesha along Ago Iwoye on Thursday and found the phone on their way back,” Onadipe told FIJ.

“He said he then charged it on Friday and turned it on. He gave us the phone, and the boys who saw it were taken to the station.”

Onadipe said the Ago-Iwoye Police summoned his presence on December 25 because they had just unearthed some new facts on the matter.

He said that the police claimed they found that someone was buried beside the spot where the lackeys of the Hausa man found the phone.

According to Onadipe, the police went to the king of the town to find out what happened there, and he confirmed that someone was indeed buried there.

“He said they saw the corpse on December 18, and they believed that a hit-and-run vehicle knocked him down, so they reported the issue to the police covering the jurisdiction. The police reported the matter to the local government, who then buried him beside the road,” said Onadipe.

He said when he learned of this, the police in the community gave him two options: to exhume him or leave him there.

An eyewitness who reached out to Onadipe’s family after the deceased’s younger brother made a post about his brother’s demise on Instagram told the family how the issue went down.

According to Onadipe, the eyewitness said that Peckulia was preaching in Ago Iwoye Park, but many thought he was a nuisance and asked him to stop, but he would not. In response to his defiance, one of the men in the park took an iron rod from a vulcanizer and hit Peckulia hard on the head.

“The eyewitness said that after my son was hit, he was bleeding profusely, and that caused a pandemic in the park. Afterward, many people left the park in fear, and the Ago-Iwoye police were invited to intervene, and when they got there, they whisked him away,” he said.

“The policemen confirmed that they carried him from the park that day and dropped him on the road, which is wrong. Initially, the police denied having any knowledge of how his body was found, but yesterday, they confessed that they took him with their vehicle away from the park alongside the chairman.”

What is still unclear, as of press time, is how his lifeless body seemed almost dismembered, with his head mashed as though it were run over by a vehicle later on. Although, as of now, three police officers from the Ago-Iwoye Police Station are at the State Criminal Investigation Department.

When FIJ called Omolola Odutola, the Ogun State Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), for comments on the matter, she said the police were still investigating the matter and would soon issue a statement to the public.