The kid was 14 years old, barely out of his childhood—small, scrawny, perhaps runny-nosed, still unsure how to handle the oncoming energy and hormones of adolescence.
He would still have been a habitué of playgrounds, although his toys would no longer be those of childhood, but the pastimes of very poor city kids entering adulthood in this country: cellphones, knives and other makeshift implements of teen gang violence, and, perhaps, the occasional, or regular, sniffing of glue, smoking of grass, snorting of crudely-made meth.
It’s not clear how this kid, Reynaldo, ended up that night in the company of the much older nineteen-year-old Carl, who would later be found dead from five bullet wounds, allegedly inflicted after trying to rob a taxi driver and then resisting arrest. Nor what happened to him afterward: one story has Reynaldo going off on his own that night to pull off a robbery somewhere in Cainta.
What’s indisputable is that the 14-year-old went missing for a good three weeks before his swollen corpse was found floating face down in a creek in far-away Gapan, Nueva Ecija. His head was wrapped with packing tape, and the boy bore 34 stab wounds all over his scrawny little body.
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Until the various official inquiries are completed, we can only speculate on the possibilities.
Did Reynaldo have the bad luck of trying to rob a property owner who fancied himself to be a Dirty Harry? Did he run into a gang confrontation, or could he have been set upon by drug users on a meth-fed violent streak? All those stab wounds are certainly consistent with violent druggie behavior.
But, no, the boy was brought all the way from Caloocan to Gapan to be dumped in that creek like an over-full garbage bag. And very few people would have taken the trouble to wrap his head with packing tape, unless their specific intent was torture—not to extract any kind of usable information from a 14-year-old, nor set some kind of cautionary example to other drug users (if indeed he was one), but simply for the pleasure of torturing this boy.
If it turns out that Reynaldo’s killers were cops—perhaps colleagues of those who set upon Carlo—then these people would not even be classifiable simply as rogue cops. Torture and murder for sadistic purposes goes beyond the pale for roguishness and scalawaggery.
Such people would be a blot—not just on the good name of the PNP, or the decent intentions of the President, or our ethnicity—but a blot on the face of humanity.
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One’s mind understandably shies away from such thoughts as this. But worse things have happened before, in other police organizations as well as our own. It would not be the first time, nor will it be the last, while the human heart is still darkened by the consequences of fallenness.
Nonetheless, we do not have any other choice but to rely on our police force to protect us from evil that can often turn incomprehensible. And when, from time to time, we are faced with the kind of betrayal of duty that took the lives of Kian and Carlo, and perhaps Reynaldo too, there are no other people we can turn to for succor but the very few men (and women) who lead that police force and bear the ultimate responsibility of command.
This is why this is no time for the man at the very top of the PNP, General “Bato” dela Rosa, to continue to convey to us with his increasingly frequent public outbursts of tears that he really isn’t a stone and can be just as emotional as the next guy. That’s been made clear enough. But at the end of the day, he can’t be just a regular guy. He’s the one the rest of us have to depend on to properly run the PNP.
Neither will all those tears convince us about the passion of the general, let alone his competence, to lead in the reform of his organization. I was, frankly, floored by his admission, during Senator Poe’s hearings, that there was still no command plan or strategy in place to address the problem of extra-judicial killings, whether the reality or the perception of it.
If he really wants to preserve the honor of the organization that he clearly loves so much, he should stop crying about it and start doing something about it. That can’t be stated any more simply.
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Should the general decide to take our advice, we’d add a final recommendation: Start by looking for slimy things under the rocks in Caloocan. Even after a change in leadership of the PNP in that city following the death of Kian, we were still presented with the killings of Carlo and Reynaldo.
Something may truly not be right with the Caloocan PNP. But General Bato, for now, is the only man we can depend on to find out for us.
Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.