My mother threatened to kill me – Six-year- old boy stabbed by mom

Six-year-old Promise Eboye, should not be alive,
at least going by the four gory looking stab
injuries on his back. The boy survived an attack
that would have killed even an adult had the
injuries been sustained in vital parts of the body.
Promise, a bright and sharp boy lives with his
mother and step-father in Kollington area of
Ijaiye, Lagos, while his biological father lives in
Benin, Edo State.
At about 8am on Monday, Promise’s mother,
Comfort, stabbed her son four times, inflicting
life-threatening injuries on the boy’s body.
The broken bottle the woman used on her son
tore into the boy’s flesh inflicting one three-inch
injury and another two-inch injury on the boy’s
back. Two other wounds looked equally horrific
but were not as long and deep as the other two.
Neighbours said if Promise had not run away
from his mother, who held tight to his wrist and
stabbed him as he screamed, he would have
been stabbed to death.
What manner of crime could such a young boy
have committed, people who witnessed the
scene have asked.
On Wednesday, our correspondent visited the
woman’s house on Olawoyin Street. The story
that Promise, his neighbours and the hospital
workers told could only be described as
incredible.
Promise, who seems to have a remarkable
memory, told us that his mother
has a “N30 cane”, which she uses to flog him,
even when he had no idea what he had done
wrong. He said she would sometimes beat him
till he could not walk.
“My mother is wicked,” Promise said simply,
quietly. As shocking as that sounded, coming
from a six-year-old, it explained the kind of
treatment the boy had been experiencing in the
hands of his mother.
Promise said he had been living with his father
in Edo State since he was one year old. But
when he was five, his mother came to take him
from his father’s house.
The boy said, “I was sweeping the day she came.
I did not know her as my mother. My father then
told me that she was my mother and she had
come to take me to Lagos.
“When we came to Lagos, I started to live with
her and my step-father. But she beat me all the
time.”
Asked what happened on Monday to make his
mother stab him, Promise said he tripped and
fell.
He said, “When I fell, my mother asked me what
pushed me and why I fell. She was angry and
went to take her N30 cane. When she was
beating me too much and I was screaming, one
of our neighbours came to hold her hand to take
the cane away from her. The woman said I
should run away because my mother would kill
me the way she was beating me.
“My mother said ‘I will kill you, I will kill you’.
When she could not find anything else to beat
me with, she took a broken bottle on the ground
and started to stab me on the back.”
Promise was rescued by alarmed residents, who
took him to a private hospital nearby.
But by the time the boy was taken to the
hospital, Comfort had planted another story in
the boy’s head.