Thursday, October 09, 2008 Witness says police’s sketch of lawyer’s killer was wrong
THE prosecution presented its first witness to the May 21, 2008 murder of lawyer Richard “Dick” Sison yesterday, a technician who used paper and pen to illustrate how a gunman approached the lawyer’s car and peppered it with bullets.
Crisanto Lagasca was the same witness the Cebu City Police Office approached when it tried to crack the case but his information didn’t get the police anywhere.
Testifying before Regional Trial Court (RTC) Judge Soliver Peras yesterday, Lagasca said that the police didn’t get the right guy because their artist’s sketch was all wrong.
The police’s artist, he said, scribbled a drawing “in about five seconds.”
When he was brought to Guinsaugon, Southern Leyte, to look at a possible suspect and to determine if that was Sison’s killer, Lagasca said no.
The NBI’s artist, on the other hand, spent two and a half hours with him and another witness and kept making changes to his drawing until both he and the other witness agreed it was the right representation of who they saw.
When he was later brought by the NBI to Barangay Camputhaw, where he got a look at accused Lemuel Sumabong via binoculars, he instinctively ran away out of fear.
“Wa ko kahibawo sa akong gibati. Mao gyud tong tawhana ang gapsuil (I don’t know how to describe how I felt. That was the guy who fired the shots),” Lagasca told the court.
The testimony was material because Senior Supt. Patrociño Comendador, the Cebu City police chief, was once quoted as saying that Sumabong’s name did not come up during their investigation and that while his face resembled the NBI’s sketch, it didn’t match the police artist’s drawing.
Lagasca identified Sumabong in court as part of yesterday’s proceedings.
“He’s a lot bigger now and his hair is longer,” Lagasca said in Cebuano during his direct examination by private prosecutor Romulo Senining.
He said he got a good look at Sumabong after the shooting because the latter, after taking a few steps away from where he fired his shots to return to a waiting motorcycle, he turned around to verify if the lawyer was indeed dead.
Using paper and pen, Lagasca drew for the court where the lawyer’s car was when it was fired upon, as well as where he was situated.
He said he was at work when it happened and incidentally looked through a clear glass window when a dark sedan screeched by.
He saw a man alighting from a motorcycle that had stopped right behind Sison’s pickup truck at a red light. He said he saw the gunman fire twice at the pickup before walking away.
Sumabong, a 30-year-old security guard from Bogo City, denied the charge in an interview after his arrest. He wept.
He said he was on duty in an establishment on Magallanes St. when Sison was killed last May 21. His colleagues vouched for his innocence. They said Sumabong never left his post on May 21. Sumabong was arrested at 8 a.m. on June 10 in Purok 8, Barangay Camputhaw by NBI 7 agents. (KNR)
