TAKOMA PARK, Md. – A Maryland man arrested in the recent killing of a pregnant woman in Takoma Park stabbed her seven times in the neck, chest and abdomen, according to a new police affidavit filed in Montgomery Count District Court on Monday.
Thierry K. Nkusu, 33, was ordered held without bond after a brief court hearing Monday, the result of an elevated charge of first-degree premeditated murder lodged against him. He originally was jailed on a second-degree murder charge.
Friends of the victim, meanwhile, continued to mourn her, and are baffled that anyone could viciously attack someone such as Maria Mbunga, 36, an outgoing school bus driver originally from Angola.
“As far as being an extrovert, she was off the scales,” said Monique Gomillion, her boss at the West Farm Bus Depot in Silver Spring. “She was a beautiful person.”
Mbunga had driven school bus routes in Montgomery since 2007, Gomillion said. She most recently was serving four schools, starting her day picking up high school students and moving on to a middle school and two elementary schools. She worked a different part-time job during the middle of the day and picked up the students again at night.
“Maria had a passion for her job and for the kids she drove,” Gomillion said.
She also made a wide circle of friends among other drivers and employees at the bus depot. When some fell on hard times, she took them in, Gomillion said, including a single mother with an infant.
“She helped people get back on their feet,” Gomillion said.
And she was ecstatic about her first pregnancy, beaming with excitement. “She just had that glow,” Gomillion said.
Mbunga’s unborn child did not survive the attack Wednesday.
When the case broke last week, detectives at the Takoma Park Police Department locked in early on Nkusu, whom they described as Mbunga’s fiance. In court papers, detectives said that Nkusu had indicated to friends that he did not want to care for the baby.
In their most recent affidavit, detectives said they spoke with a neighbor of Mbunga’s who heard yelling and crying from the apartment on Houston Avenue, just north of the D.C. border.
“Leave me alone!” a female voice yelled from inside Mbunga’s apartment, the affidavit says.
The neighbor told detectives that a man also could be heard yelling, and a woman could be heard crying. Both voices seemed to have African accents, the witness told police. Nkusa has told police he is from Congo.
The upgraded murder charges appear to be the result of autopsy results. Mbunga was found with seven stabbing and three cutting wounds – including cuts on the back of her hands, an indication that she was trying to ward off an attack.
One stab to Mbunga’s neck cut her jugular vein. Others injured her lungs and small intestine.
At the crime scene, Takoma Park police officers “found blood throughout the apartment,” according to the new affidavit.
Nkusu has told detectives that he and Mbunga had a good relationship and that he had often texted her to check on the progress of her pregnancy, according to court records.
“He stated they are both Christians and that they solve their problems with words,” detectives wrote last week.
Nkusu also said that he was attacked in the apartment by an unknown masked man. That story, according to police, fell apart.
At the bus depot, Gomillion recalled how Mbunga kept her students in line.
“She was no-nonsense,” Gomillion said. “She could handle 55 students behind her while driving a school bus.”
Gomillion said she had seen Mbunga in action dealing with an unruly student. “You need to come up front with me,” she would say, “where I can talk with you.”
Eventually, whether it was that day, or days later, the student would get to go back to the seats with the others.
Students and parents at all four schools Mbunga served were told of her death. The amount of details shared, according to a school spokesman, varied with the ages of the students.
“A lot of them were crying,” Gomillion said. “How do you explain something like this to kids, when you can’t explain it to each other?”
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Dan Morse
