From murky to murkier

Despite the arrest and confession of a primary suspect in the brutal massacre last month of a family in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan, the case is far from resolution and has gone from murky to murkier.

The circumstances surrounding the case easily make it every family’s nightmare: A security guard comes home from work in the morning and finds his wife, three small children and blind mother-in-law stabbed to death, the two women unclothed and probably raped.

The police have made much of the early arrest of 26-year-old construction worker Carmelino Ibañez, but there are just too many loose ends. One, Ibañez claimed to have “killed them all” while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Yet a drug test found him negative for drugs, and investigators explained the result away as a matter of metabolism. Two, the suspect said he had acted alone, which seems implausible. Can only one man inflict such unmitigated brutality on women and children, including a one-year-old?

In fact, a few days after his confession, Ibañez implicated two other men in the crime. He also disavowed raping the women, contrary to what he had initially claimed. The results of the medical and forensic examinations have yet to be released, but the inevitable questions arise: Was the extralegal confession made under duress? Was he a fall guy set up by the cops so they could declare the case closed and collect the P100,000 reward put up by local officials?

The case appears to rest entirely on the suspect’s facile confession, with no forensic evidence to back it. Why the haste in apprehending and presenting the suspect to the media without more inputs from the police investigation as well as forensic proof?

And despite the negative finding on Ibañez’s drug use, his purported motive for committing the crime has gained traction in the government’s bloody war on drugs. The massacre is being touted as further proof that drug users/pushers are behind the most heinous crimes.

But there are just too many puzzling developments in this case. On Tuesday, a man was found stabbed to death in a neighboring subdivision in Bulacan; a cardboard sign identified him as a “rapist and pusher.” The dead man turned out to be Ronald Pacinos, one of the drinking buddies and partner in crime named by the suspect Ibañez. Pacinos had been invited twice for police questioning and then released, and was then said to have been abducted by armed men and gone missing. Could the police have been involved in his abduction and killing? To what end?

If nothing else, this case illustrates how frustrating police investigation can be — with suspects produced willy-nilly, their admission and confession to the crime conveniently hewing to the official narrative, and forensic evidence taking too long to be unearthed. Soon enough, “persons of interest” and suspects are apprehended, only to later turn up dead — even while under police custody. Already, a third suspect was last seen forcibly being loaded into a van, and has since gone missing, too. Will he, like Pacinos, wind up dead as well? But why?

Once more, it has to be asked: How dependable and thorough was the police investigation? Was the scene of the crime preserved at all? How were similar crime scenes preserved—for example, the Vizconde massacre (it was not) — and what investigative practices proved most helpful?

Such questions from a largely skeptical public have prompted Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre to order the National Bureau of Investigation to conduct a parallel inquiry, hopefully with fresh eyes unclouded by the official line on drugs.

But then again, will the justice department heed the findings of its own subagency? Recall how a justice official—without the express consent of Secretary Aguirre, as claimed by Aguirre himself — moved to downgrade charges from murder to homicide against the police officers involved in the killing of town mayor Rolando Espinosa inside a jail cell in November 2016. In that case, the NBI’s conclusion was that the killing of the mayor was premeditated and planned.

Still, with another person of interest gone missing in the murky San Jose del Monte case, perhaps it’s time the NBI stepped in.