“I wanted to cry with them, not because na sentimental ako by the profound sorrow ... May anak rin ako, eh, iyan ang problema...”--- President Duterte, Feb. 20, 2019
THE President was describing how he felt when he met with the parents of Ashley Abad, two weeks earlier, in Malacanang, who told him how their daughter died of drug overdose the day after a pre-Sinulog party in Cebu City last Jan. 19.
The grief-struck parents wanted to find out who supplied Ecstacy pills to their daughter, a 19-year-old nursing student, who collapsed at the party. They thought she was plied with the prohibited drug by someone else, her boyfriend or anyone among her friends. She must have been induced by others, they surmised in pressing for the investigation.
So Ashley’s parents went to the highest official of the land. “Nagreklamo sila, they want to get justice,” said President Duterte.
Did they get justice when in a speech Wednesday (Feb. 20) President Duterte announced the finding of the police investigation, which toppled the initial theory of the victim’s innocence? Obviously, not the kind they wanted or most people expected.
Who gave whom
Duterte said Ashley “was the one who was actually texting another girl na maghati sila doon kasi ‘yung isa, reserba niya para sa kanyang boyfriend.”
The boyfriend, Nel Spencer Tiu, had met with the police last Feb. 13, after several days of holding out and refusing to talk, and denied he was the one who gave Ashley the pills. And then there was the President in effect confirming Tiu’s claim.
That seems to clear Tiu on whether he coaxed Ashley to take the drug. She turned out, if the President was right, to be a willing taker who decided who would get which pill. Still, it does not answer the question on the source of the pricey drug: who sold it to them?
Persons to charge
The police still have to identify the persons they will charge with homicide through reckless imprudence, a crime they can’t just pin on anyone else if Ashley was the one apportioning the pills among her acquaintances.
Better still if they can trace the source: the pusher or trafficker, who decidedly committed the more grievous crime.
Investigators have been quiet. And public noise had been about Ashley’s boyfriend and the friends who partied with them that night, one of whom must have coaxed Ashley to take the drug. The fuss is over the theory of reckless imprudence, resulting in Ashley’s death, not the identity of the one who peddled the lethal contraband.
Who speaks for her?
The dead cannot defend themselves. No one can speak for Ashley, we are told, unless her friends who know what happened will speak out. But then these people might think that by keeping quiet they could protect her memory.
Ashley’s parents didn’t know details of the evcnt that preceded her collapse at the party. If they knew, they not have pushed for the inquiry. And they would not have foreseen the President telling the nation about an adverse result of the investigation.
Ashley’s case was lumped with Duterte’s new strike at accused drug trafficker Peter Lim: go kill yourself, he told the Cebu businessman.
Saving other Ashleys
Is Ashley being “killed” again? Sympathizers of the deceased chide the fresh publicity that drags her to the public stage once more. The President apparently could not resist the use of her case to argue his war on drugs.
But the Ashley case, one may consider, argues more for saving drug users and protecting would-be addicts who are preyed on by drug merchants. Perhaps her lesson can instruct and save a few other Ashleys in the community.