Nurse of the Week Margaret Ruto is also a Part-Time Crime Fighter

Now that Kenyan-born Nurse of the Week Margaret Ruto is on the scene, someone should tell Chris Hansen that there’s a new player in the predator-catching business. One day in 2017, while working toward her nursing degree in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Ruto came across a Facebook post about the closing of a children’s home near her old village in Kenya. The missionary who had run the home, Gregory Dow, fled the country and took shelter… to Lancaster, PA, just 10 minutes away from Ruto’s own house!

Learning that a child abuser had used her village’s children’s home as his personal playpen galvanized her. Between attending classes and studying, Ruto stayed up late to contact authorities: local police. The District Attorney’s office. The State Department. The US Embassy in Kenya. She got nowhere.

The nursing student felt compelled to do all she could to help the youngsters and bring the home’s proprietor/abuser to justice, even if it meant taking time off from school, but fortunately it did not come to that. Still, “I was getting ready to drop out of the [local community college] nursing program to pursue this case,” she told Lancaster Online. “That’s how passionate I was.” In 2018, after classes ended, Ruto flew to Kenya to see her ailing mother-in-law, and began to investigate the situation for herself. Traveling an hour to reach the village where the shuttered children’s home was located, she shuttled to and from the site as she listened to and recorded the survivors’ accounts. According to the Post, “She gained the trust of the abused girls and their parents and took down their gut-wrenching version of events in notepads and videos on her phone.”

The FBI, sped by the evidence that Ruto amassed in her private investigations, was able to wrap up its case against Dow in a few months. In July, 2018, the nurse-detective’s selfless persistence paid off when police arrested Gregory Dow at his home in East Hempfield Township, PA.

For the full, remarkable story about Margaret Ruto and her investigation, see Lancaster Online or read the Washington Post article.

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Koren Thomas

Associate Editor at DailyNurse

Koren Thomas (pictured with Assistant) was the associate editor of DailyNurse from late 2019 through July, 2022—and she was not joking about the "issue postage stamps saluting US nurses" idea. Send your article ideas, submissions, Nurse of the Week suggestions, comments, and corrections to the current Editor in Chief at [email protected].