US Citizen jailed over disappearance of Kenyan woman appeals sentence
Mr Nathan Hightman, a US ctizen handed a six-year jail-term in relation to the disappearance of a Kenyan woman in the country, has appealed the sentence.
On July 3, 2023, the convicted was handed the opportunity to appeal the sentence.
Mr Hightman met Ms Irene Gakwa, the lady who disappeared, were lovers. They met in February 2022 on an online dating application and settled in Gillete as lovers.
In the orders granted this week, District Judge James Mike did not find a problem with Mr Hightman moving to the higher court and seeking counsel from the State Public Defender’s Appellate Office.
Public defender Dallas Lamb had earlier on made a court filing saying that Mr Hightman had made the decision to appeal. He will be appealing his sentence to the Wyoming Supreme Court.
Mr Hightman was jailed for six years after he confessed to stealing money amounting to Sh366,000 from Ms Gakwa’s bank account, running up her credit cards and also deleting her email accounts.
All the three felonies which he pleaded guilty to occurred after February 24, 2022, when the fiancée was last seen in a video call with her parents.
It is then that he was sentenced up to six years in prison, three years of supervised probation and more than Sh18 million in restitution, fines and legal fees for felony convictions of theft, unlawful use of credit card and crimes against intellectual property.
“Hightman entered into a “cold plea,” according to Campbell County Attorney Nathan Henkes.
This means there’s no sentencing recommendation by either the state or the defense, and each party can argue whatever sentence they see fit,” International media reported after the sentencing.
Since her disappearance in February 2022, family and friends of Ms Gakwa have been fighting for justice with the police including the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) carrying out investigations with the aim of finding her.
The investigations have so far revealed that days after she went silent Ms Gakwa’s bank password was changed via her Samsung Galaxy phone and a message was also sent to her employer informing them that she had quit her job.
The same phone also sent a message to her other family members in the US that she had moved to Texas.
They have further revealed that Mr Hightman was captured on CCTV footage using one of Ms Gakwa’s credit cards to buy a pair of boots, jeans and a shovel from a supermarket in the US.
Three months after she went missing, Gillete police officers then made the decision to arrest Mr Hightman and said he was a person of interest in the case.
However, Mr Hightman has maintained that he has nothing to do with her disappearance and that Ms Gakwa bid him goodbye on the fateful day before she boarded a dark-colored SUV.
Ms Gakwa arrived in the US in 2019 and was a nursing student.
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