I DON’T know what got into their heads, but PO1s Melvin and Thomas Cañete are probably wishing they could turn back the time right about now.
I get it. They were scared. But who wouldn’t be, considering the history of violence that hounds Guihulngan City in Negros Oriental?
But the two cousins from Dalaguete, Cebu were not alone. I mean, they were with 1,000 other police officers who were in the area to serve search warrants to owners of unlicensed firearms. So there was no reason for them to up and run when they heard a volley of gunfire on Dec. 27. Unless, of course, they were ligyrophobic. If that were the case, then they should have told their superiors about their condition instead of just fleeing like two scaredy-cats. Which was what they did.
By the way, two police inspectors from the Regional Mobile Force Battalion (RMFB) 7 and a chief inspector from the Cebu City Police Office also went awol (absent without official leave) that same day. But the report did not say if the gunfire also scared them off. It just said they returned to Cebu without securing the permission of Police Regional Office 7 Director Debold Sinas.
Either way, all of them have been relieved. They now languish in the Regional Personnel Holding Accounting Unit, the resting place of police officers with a big letter “L” on their foreheads.
Sinas was so beside himself with worry, and rage, when he heard about the disappearance of the Cañete cousins that he ordered all the cops involved in the operation to look for them.
Not that I blame him. After all, it was a routine operation, involving a thousand police officers.
Members of the RMFB 7 and police officers from other units scoured the countryside of Negros Oriental—actually, that was not part of the report but I just assumed they did—for a whole day, but there was no Melvin and no Thomas.
Later that night, though, the two showed up with a story that got them into this predicament.
According to the cousins, “they got lost in the confusion that followed the gunfire and ended up in a river” in one of Guihulngan’s mountain barangays.
That should have been the end of it. But then they forgot they were talking to police who had spent the whole day looking for them. Of course, their story would be checked, dissected, analyzed, examined, studied, investigated and whatnot.
Sinas, who had a conniption earlier, explained in Cebuano: “When the gunfire started, the Cañetes got scared and fled. They went to the city and hid while the whole RMFB 7 looked for them until night time. I got so mad because I thought we had casualties only to find out during our technical support that when their (Cañetes’) cellular phones were ‘pinged,’ they were in the city the whole time.”
Okay, first of all, I had no idea what getting “pinged” meant so I looked it up.
According to thefreedictionary.com, it’s reaching out to someone, as by text or email, to establish or maintain communication.
So while the Cañetes’ colleagues sweated out the elements to locate them, they were inside a restaurant in the city doing I don’t know what. Probably had a nice cold beer after several sticks of pork barbecue.
And I bet you they also probably thought they would get away with it.