Okeny, who immigrated to America as a boy to live with his graduate-student father, graduated from high school in Salem, Massachusetts, and hoped to join the US Army after obtaining his citizenship. Although Okeny had experienced some legal trouble, including a 2005 drug conviction and an arrest for operating after suspension just days before suffering his fatal injury, he had, according to family, been preparing to transfer credits from a Massachusetts community college to a program at the University of Southern Maine. But tragedy intervened.
On the evening of October 20, Okeny and two other men bought alcohol at the Back Bay Hannaford, and then went to drink at an apartment on Anderson Street. According to Deputy Police Chief William Ridge, people who were there eventually told the police that Okeny left sometime later, alone and on foot. Shortly after 1 am a security camera at the nearby 7-11 filmed Okeny lingering in the store. Okeny, whom Ridge described as appearing intoxicated on the tape, left the store at 1:38 am, without the sandwich he had purchased, never to be seen mobile and upright again. A half-hour later police received a call about a man lying face-down in a nearby intersection. Officers found Okeny with a severe injury to the back of his head, empty wallet at his side. Rushed into surgery at Maine Medical Center, Okeny lingered in a coma for 18 days, and eventually died without regaining consciousness.
No evidence of anything
Police originally told the WEN’s Niblock he was the victim of a “strong-arm robbery,” but have since changed their tune, without explaining why, and now say they don’t know whether he was robbed before or after suffering the head injury, whether he fell and hit his head, or whether someone bashed his head in.
Asked if police have any evidence specifically suggesting Okeny fell on his own, Ridge says, “What we have is no evidence at all.” The police are treating the death as suspicious, but not a murder, because “at this point we have a man with a head injury that is consistent with something hitting his head. That could be anything. That could be a baseball bat. That could be a brick. That could be the sidewalk. We have no information.”
And why didn’t the police turn to the media to help put the puzzle together? “Mostly because he was alive, and the best evidence we have is simply that he was on the sidewalk,” Ridge says. “We found him on the sidewalk. He was in the hospital alive. Our best hope at that point is simply that he wakes up and tells us what happened to him. It’s irresponsible for us to go out and say, ‘we’ve had a murder at the corner of Cumberland Avenue and Anderson Street’ when two things are untrue. One is, nobody is dead, so we don’t have a murder. Two is, we don’t know that that’s what we have. We’re not in the habit of labeling things before we know what they are.” That changed 18 days after Edward’s hospitalization, when he died. “That’s when we went public with that,” Ridge says. “Prior to that we had nothing to publicize other than that we had a man in the hospital and we didn’t know why.”
