AFTER they paddled one of their own to death, members of the Aegis Juris fraternity plotted to escape paying the price for murder. This became all too apparent at the Senate hearing last week on the hazing death of University of Santo Tomas law student Horacio Castillo, who paid the ultimate price last month to be a member of a group that, as it turned out, was utterly unworthy of his trust and loyalty.
A Facebook Messenger chat among seven Aegis Juris members showed that they enthusiastically planned an initiation rite that they knew to be dangerous and prohibited. Then, after Castillo was dead, they planned to cover it up with a “code of silence” and the deactivation of their social media accounts.
But a subsequent chat presented during the hearing by Senior Supt. Joel Coronel, director of the Manila Police District, showed the extent to which fraternity members sought to cover up the crime to evade prosecution.
The chat thread showed that most members were in a panic over what to do about the death of Castillo and later agreed to meet at the Novotel Hotel to discuss the case. While some were in favor of talking with Castillo’s parents, most said they wanted to avoid and evade prosecution, and were concerned that the incident would destroy the future of their fraternity brothers who were involved in the hazing.
Part of the discussion involved a plan to contact the family in hopes of reaching an agreement or settlement, but most members said they would find ways to see that evidence would no longer be available to those conducting the investigation.
“To our mind, it appears that the agreement made then by those who met at Novotel Hotel was to cover up and to obstruct justice,” Coronel told the Senate panel.
At the hearing, the president of the fraternity, Arvin Balag, exemplified this stragegy by refusing to even say if he was a member of Aegis Juris.
His refusal to answer even the most basic of questions on the grounds that he could incriminate himself seemed supremely arrogant, particularly in light of earlier testimony from another fraternity member that it was he who ordered that Castillo be taken to Chinese General Hospital rather than the nearby UST Hospital, and that those who took him should lie about the circumstances of his condition.
It was he who declared a code of silence.
But no code can silence the tragic story told by Castillo’s body, which bore bruises on both arms, cigarette burns and candle wax drippings all over his body.
In the end, the Senate panel declared Balag in contempt for refusing to answer their questions, and ordered him detained.
But our contempt for him and his fellow fraternity brothers goes deeper than that. For beating a fellow student to death, then cynically trying to cover it up to save their own “future” with their “code of silence,” Balag and the Aegis Juris fraternity show a complete lack of any sense of right and wrong, and an utter disregard for justice. They are a blight on the University of Santo Tomas and our society. How could we have produced such men?