Monday, August 18, 2008 Body turns out to be thief By Jasson Aguilar
WHEN Arnel Licayo allegedly tried to escape the clutches of the law by jumping into a creek in Trancoville barangay, he didn't know his fate was sealed.
Licayo, a jobless 30-year-old man of Iron St., Upper Quezon Hill, at 2 a.m. of August 16, allegedly robbed a taxi driver of his Nokia 6020 cellphone at gunpoint.
The driver, June Bugnay Damoy, 28, single and a resident of Km 3 Balili, La Trinidad, said he picked up Licayo in front of the Aspulan Restaurant around 2 a.m. of August 16.
He added, Licayo was to be ferried somewhere in Baguio City.
However, when they reached the Magsaysay flyover, Licayo supposedly brought a gun and announced the holdup. After grabbing the cellphone of the driver, he allegedly ran towards Trancoville and jumped over the bridge near Police Station
2.
When Damoy reported the incident to police of Station 2, they immediately went to the area where Licayo allegedly jumped but after minutes of searching the area, came up with nothing.
The incident would have been another unsolved holdup of a taxi driver in Baguio were it not for two scavengers scouring the banks of the Balili River for recoverable plastic.
At 8:15 in the morning of the same day, a certain Tay-ob and his companion Umpong were searching for recyclable plastic along the Balili when they saw a body floating on the river. They fished the body out of the water and quickly reported their find to Station 2.
It was then police said the body fit the description of the hold-upper six hours earlier.
A scene-of-the-crime operations (Soco) team went to where the body was found to try and determine how Licayo died, they could not find the stolen cellphone anywhere.
