Burden of guilt

If, as police allege with many other victims of extrajudicial killings, Ranilo Maydan Jr. had been killed because he dared resist arrest, then perhaps it would have taken two or three or four shots at the most to bring him down.

But 34 times? That sounds more like an execution. Or, as a story in this paper puts it, “target practice.”

It sounded like “someone had lit up a Judas Belt on New Year’s Eve,” said an eyewitness, referring to the rapid fire similar to the infamous firecracker with deadly effects, which may have earned it its ominous nickname.

Maydan, 32, was no big-time drug dealer; he made a living selling scraps and, according to his loved ones, had long given up the habit.

His live-in lover Abby, whose real name is Abner Habulan and who works part-time as a makeup artist, said even Maydan’s fingers bore bullet wounds, showing that he was covering his face while the bullets came flying at him, and that one was even found lodged in his lower teeth, evidence that the shooters had aimed at his head.

Why did Abby know such intimate details of how his lover had died? Because he did the makeup for his boyfriend’s corpse to get it ready for the wake. “I wanted to help prepare his body because I wanted him to know that I cared for him until our very last moment together.”

If this were a telenovela, the scene would slowly fade to black while a romantic theme song rose in crescendo.

But this is real life, transpiring in the mean streets of Manila, in the midst of the horrific “War on Drugs.”

Abby and his sisters, who were with Maydan when the armed men wearing black jackets and ski masks came for him, say the late scraps dealer called some of the men “sir,” insisting that they had come after the wrong man. The killers, it is alleged, belong to the so-called “Caloocan Death Squad,” perhaps a throwback to the notorious “Davao Death Squad” (DDS) that is being linked to President Duterte who was mayor of Davao City when the DDS was at its heyday.

Maydan would have been just another number among the thousands of casualties of this war, were it not for an enterprising reporter’s ferreting out of certain details.

Abby and other observers shared that Maydan’s body seemed extraordinarily “heavy” during the wake and funeral. During the wake, the stand bearing the coffin broke, and it took 15 people to lift the coffin onto another stand. As the coffin was being transported to Maydan’s final resting place, added Abby and friends, the hearse suffered a flat tire, and some commented about how heavy the body seemed to be. An old folks’ belief, they said, was that when the body of a victim of violent crime is unusually heavy, “it means that the person is seeking justice for his death.”

Perhaps they’re talking about the guilt that is (or should be) weighing down the minds of Maydan’s killers, and everyone else behind the rampage that has been let loose in the streets of the metropolis.

I once came across an FB post where someone remarked that on his way home one day, he was delayed briefly before boarding a jeep to talk to a friend. When he arrived at his destination, he saw a crowd gathered around a corpse, someone who had died as a result of the war on drugs. It then occurred to him that if he had boarded his jeep at the time he intended, he could very well have ended up in the victim’s place, either as a victim of mistaken identity or as “collateral damage.”

If we think that just because we don’t do drugs—use or sell them or associate with people who do—then we’re safe from the crazier aspects of this drug war, then we’ve got it wrong. Because we all still need to move about the city—nay, the country—and so do our friends and loved ones. If we don’t see this war as a danger to all of us, users or innocents, then don’t be surprised if one day we realize that, as a line from a famous poem goes, “Then they came for me—and there was no one was left to speak for me.”