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Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Revenge, says family on triple murder
By Jovy S. Taghoy
Sun.Star Staff Reporter
The family of slain couple Zacarias and Esterlita Flores believes revenge is the motive behind the killing. They identified a former neighbor in Barangay Ermita, Cebu City as the mastermind.
Geraldine, the couple’s youngest daughter, dismissed reports that the attack last Sunday night on Magallanes St. was the handiwork of vigilantes.
She told Sun.Star Cebu yesterday that a former neighbor (name withheld pending his side of the story) threatened to kill them after the shooting to death of a policeman in August 2001.
Her brother Renante owned up to killing SPO4 Da Vinci Pestańas on Aug. 18, 2001, on suspicion that the policeman was the informant in an anti-drug operation by the defunct Regional Anti-Narcotics Office (Rano) earlier that year.
The raid resulted in the arrest of Zacarias and Esterlita after the operatives allegedly found more than 200 grams of shabu in their residence in Barangay Tuyan, Naga, Cebu.
Renante is jailed at the Bagong Buhay Rehabilitation Center, awaiting verdict.
Geraldine said they have been receiving death threats ever since.
Prior to the killing of Zacarias and Esterlita, both 55, last Sunday night, Geraldine said two people were spotted near the victims’ vehicle, a white Mitsubishi Pajero parked along Magallanes St. The two appeared to be waiting for someone.
The next thing they learned, Geraldine said, was the shooting to death of her parents and family driver Giovanni Jimenez Renquezo, 28.
Geraldine, together with her sister Cecilia, went to see Homicide Section Chief Insp. Mario Monilar yesterday, and told him about their suspicions.
Monilar and Supt. Pablo Labra II, chief of the Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Bureau, however, said they couldn’t zero in yet on one angle because they are also considering a drug-related angle.
Labra said they also received unconfirmed reports that Zacarias was in gun-for-hire business.
Labra said the couple had been known as “big-time drug pushers.”
They had been included in the 1997 drug expose of Rep. Antonio Cuenco (Cebu City, south) and in the order of battle of people suspected of being involved in the illegal drug trade.
The couple was tagged as belonging to the level-two category.
(A level-two drug pusher can dispose a minimum of 200 grams to more than 20 kilos of shabu a week.)
But Geraldine denied her parents were drug pushers.
She said her parents raised hogs for a living, and the family has two stores: one at the Carbon market, the other in Ermita.
But she admitted her parents were jailed five times for drug-related cases.
Labra said the couple had been subjected to several drug raids by his office and the Vice Control Section.
The latest operation was early this year, wherein two Ermita councilmen were investigated for allegedly trying to intervene in one of the subjects of the simultaneous raid against five suspected drug pushers in the barangay that included the Flores couple.
The joint teams from the city police failed to arrest the Floreses because they were not around, but recovered evidence for them to be charged with possession of shabu.
Labra, however, expressed dismay after the search warrant against the couple was quashed.
(November 8, 2005 issue)
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