Saturday, May 10, 2008 Editorials: Evading punishment, again
IT looks like the killing of Recolly Igoy and his cousin Ronaldo Enario in Pakigne, Minglanilla last May 7 is going the way of vigilante-style deaths in Cebu City: unsolved.
The same feeling of relatives of people executed by suspected vigilantes is surfacing in the case of Igoy and Enario, which is lack of confidence in law enforcers.
Thus, victims’ relatives are only too eager to bury their dead and forget about the pursuit of justice, a normal recourse of the aggrieved in civilized societies.
Suspicion
One can brand as unfair the Igoy’s family belief that the police was behind the killing with Enario as collateral damage (Igoy’s wife and sister suffered gunshot wounds).
But there is sense in the belief despite police claim that Igoy was to turn state witness and was killed by robbery gang members apparently to silence him.
(Why no attempt by the police to protect the “witness” is worth asking.)
The idea of gangs or syndicates rubbing out an arrested cohort to prevent him from “singing” sounds believable because of its repetitive use in action movies.
Real life, however, is different and in our case the usual reaction of cohorts of arrested gang members is to evade police follow-up operations by fleeing.
And if claim of a deliberate effort to delay the release of Igoy on bail is true, the suspicion about the involvement of authorities in the killing may have a leg to stand on.
Unsolved
The problem is that the angle may no longer be pursued considering the decision of the relatives of Igoy and Enario not to push for the investigation of the killing.
If so, we will again hear the familiar refrain of Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa,” used by wags to describe the city’s unsolved crimes: they just lie there and they die there.
And the public, numbed by the vigilante-style killings that mercifully has abated and desperate for gains in efforts to curb criminality, may no longer make a fuss about it.
That will help the killers evade punishment but is not flattering to law enforcers.
