A year of searching for Irene Gakwa

GILLETTE — It’s tough to pinpoint the right word to describe what the past year has been like for the family members of Irene Gakwa.
 
Their weeks and months have been a lot of things: surreal, painful, frustrating and a nightmare, among other descriptors. But beneath that all, there’s been an undeniable sense of hope.
 
That level of hope, and its varying degrees, has been perhaps their most vague and constant shared feeling over the past year.
 
They have been through so much since the investigation into Irene Gakwa’s disappearance from Gillette began a year ago that it’s hard to look back and know precisely when that sense of hope began to fade away.
 
“It’s sad,” said Kennedy Wainaina, Irene’s brother. “It’s sad that up to now, we probably don’t have anything. I think we’re just where we were a year ago. I was more hopeful a year ago. Now that it’s been a year, I don’t know.”
 
Irene was last seen and heard from Feb. 24, 2022, and the investigation into her disappearance began a few weeks later, on March 20, when she was reported missing. 
 
The family knew something was very wrong by the time the report was made to the Gillette Police Department.
 
Police soon identified a person of interest in her disappearance, Nathan J. Hightman — Irene’s fiancé — and charged him with five felonies, alleging he emptied Irene’s bank account, ran up two of her credit cards and deleted her Gmail account in the days and weeks after she was last heard from. But in the months since, there have been few updates on the status of the investigation.
 
A year later, Irene has not been found, and no one has been charged in connection to her disappearance.
 
Sometime along the way, Wainaina and his family’s hope began to fade. Early on, they knew the answers they sought may be difficult to know, but regardless of the outcome, they wanted answers and thought they’d eventually get them.
 
Now, even with the ongoing litigation and investigation, Wainaina said he has come away from his talks with police and prosecutors feeling like the case may soon go cold.
 
“It’s something that’s coming to mind lately,” he said.
 
The parents, who live in Kenya, and the children, who live in Boise, Idaho, have spent a lot of the past year asking and thinking through questions they still have about what happened to Irene in Gillette.
 
Francis Gakwa remembers his daughter Irene’s hair from the last time he saw her.
 
It was Feb. 24 — almost a month before she was first reported missing to the Gillette Police Department. He was in Kenya, talking to Irene on a video call while she was in Gillette.
 
“I do remember,” Francis said. “She would normally have her hair done properly, but that time the hair wasn’t done properly, and I talked about it.”
It was something a father would notice and one of a number of things they talked about during their 30 minutes or so on the phone, before he handed the call to Irene’s mother. Something about her hair stands out in memory a year later, but it wasn’t until a few days after the video call that he knew something was wrong.
 
Irene rarely went more than a couple of days without talking with her parents. If she did, those days would be interspersed with text messages checking in. In their messages, they would write to each other in a blend of Swahili and English.
 
When a message came from Irene’s phone claiming the phone fell in water, breaking the microphone and making their video calls impossible, it was written entirely in English, Francis said. It was a red flag at the time. And in his mind, he’s certain it wasn’t Irene who sent it.
 
Francis and his family suspect that Hightman had been using Irene’s phone during those days, after she was last seen and before she was reported missing.
 
Hightman’s alleged behavior those days led to the five felony charges he currently faces but has not helped answer the family’s biggest question: What happened to Irene?
 
The exact details of what happened between Feb. 24, when Irene was last seen and March 20, when she was reported missing, remains a mystery to the Gakwa family.
 
A number of details surfaced from the charging documents and court proceedings that coincided with Hightman’s arrest May 10, but details explaining what happened to Irene remain unclear.
 
The timeline of events paints a suspicious picture of Hightman, who remains a person of interest but has not been charged in connection with Irene’s disappearance.
 
Irene was last seen on the video call with her parents Feb. 24. The next day, her bank password was changed via her Samsung Galaxy phone and a message was sent to her employer that she quit her job. 
 
That same day, Feb. 25, surveillance footage shows Hightman using one of Irene’s credit cards to buy a pair of boots, jeans and a shovel from Walmart, according to court documents.
 
Throughout the following weeks, more than $3,600 was emptied from Irene’s bank account and two of her credit cards were used to run up more than $3,000 in charges, including one credit card that was shut off after surpassing its limit. Police have connected Hightman with the credit card charges and the money transferred from Irene’s bank account, which was allegedly sent to a Zelle money-transferring account belonging to Hightman, according to court documents.
 
A couple of weeks after Irene was last heard from, on March 10, her Gmail account was deleted, leading to one of the five charges Hightman is facing.
 

 
Ten days later, Irene was reported missing and the police investigation into her disappearance began.
 
Police contacted Hightman the day the report was made, one of the times they spoke with him before he sought a lawyer and stopped cooperating with the investigation.
 
In the interactions he had with police, he said Irene had moved out of the Gillette home they shared at the end of February. After she returned home from a restaurant one evening, she packed her clothes into two plastic bags, announced she was leaving Gillette and left in a dark-colored SUV, he said.
 
When police found evidence that Hightman had removed money from her bank account, he admitted to taking money from her account to force her to contact him when she eventually needed money, according to court documents.
 
“It’s clear it’s a lie and the police cannot crack that,” Francis said of the narrative Hightman gave to police. “Surely, it doesn’t take a whole year, and it doesn’t take an aeronautical engineer, or a NASA engineer, or a professor, to crack that.”
 
“They have dots but choose not to join them,” he added.
 
Police sought and executed a number of search warrants during the investigation, including ones with Idaho Central Credit Union and Capital One Visa that led to their basis for the felonies Hightman has been charged with. Search warrants for Irene’s Gmail account, location information and others were also sought, according to court documents.
 
The evidence led to felony charges for two counts of theft, two counts of crimes against intellectual property and unlawful use of a credit card, which Hightman pleaded not guilty to in June.
 
In October, police and FBI personnel got another warrant and searched Hightman’s home on Pathfinder Circle. They were seen removing a number of covered items from the home that day.
 
New information has been sparse since then, including in regular conversations that Wainaina has with police, he said.
 
“When we talk to them every week and they don’t really give any new information because it’s a pending investigation, it gets frustrating,” he said.
 
Francis said that he was not in favor of his daughter’s move from Kenya to Boise a few years ago, but that he ultimately respected Irene’s right to make that decision for herself. From his perspective as a father and aeronautical engineer whose work has taken him to many countries, including the United States, he said he recognizes when race is a factor.
 
“If she was white it would have gone differently,” Francis said. “By now they would be having the evidence, they’d have a conviction for this man. All they are waiting for is for us to cool down. The memory’s still fresh.”
 
In a statement to the News Record, police said all crimes and allegations are investigated with equal care and respect.
 
“The Gillette Police Department continues to investigate the circumstances related to the disappearance of Irene Gakwa,” according to a Gillette Police Department statement.
 
“Our team remains dedicated to finding answers to bring Irene home. We investigate all crimes and allegations with an equal amount of respect and care. The Gillette Police Department is committed to public safety and building community partnerships through integrity, trust and transparency.”
 
Police Deputy Chief Brent Wasson said the investigation is ongoing and that there are no new updates at this time.
 
“It’s not like I don’t respect their job and realize they’re professionals,” Wainaina said, “but at the end of the day, I’m still left with the question of what happened to my sister.”
 
Francis, Wainaina and their family are left with unanswered questions and dwindling hope.
 
They had hoped for more clarity, and more charges, before April 3, when Hightman is scheduled for a 10-day trial on the five felonies. With that date fast approaching, and the limited information they’ve received, they feel the evidence is unlikely to arise in time.
 
The trial dates had been delayed twice. During the January pre-trial conference, Hightman’s public defender Dallas Lamb and County Attorney Nathan Henkes, the prosecutor on the case, indicated that the defense may be filing a motion requesting to change the trial venue outside of Campbell County.
 
In addition to that lingering possibility, both sides still have the chance to strike a plea agreement, leaving Wainaina to believe the case has grown less likely to go to trial.
 
“It’s frustrating and disappointing and really to me, this is not justice,” Wainaina said. “The justice system here has totally failed us.”
 
When attempting to contact Henkes and the Campbell County Attorney’s Office for comment, a county attorney’s office employee declined comment on behalf of the office.
 
Henkes did not respond to an email requesting comment and Lamb did not return a message requesting comment.
 
“True, there are charges for the financial crimes but compared to somebody’s life? That’s nothing,” Wainaina said.
 
He and Francis each said they care less about a potential conviction than they do finding out what happened to Irene. They haven’t gotten the answers they wanted yet, and have lost hope they will ever get them, but they’ve held on to enough to believe the truth is still out there.
 
“Nathan knows the truth, my late daughter knows the truth and God knows the truth,” Francis said.
 
“All I’m asking is to know the truth so I can have the closure.”
 
This story was published on Mar. 18, 2023.