WHAT was he thinking? Did he really think he could get away with it?
On Monday, July 29, 2019, news broke out that 22-year-old Romy Ramas was stabbed in the back while playing basketball at the Mandaue City Jail-Male Dormitory.
At least, that was what Deputy Jail Warden Mark Tuñacao told members of the media despite nearby residents reporting that they had heard three successive gunshots.
Jail personnel did not find any bullets or fired cartridges at the scene. So the victim couldn’t have been shot. Right? Yet, they also did not find the improvised bladed weapon supposedly used to kill him. So he couldn’t have been stabbed.
I mean, I am just following Tuñacao’s logic.
But the truth came out. As it usually does. Especially when the victim’s body underwent an autopsy.
I’m not familiar with what a bullet wound looks like. And trust me, I don’t want to be. So maybe it’s difficult to tell it apart from a stab wound. Maybe that was why Tuñacao was very confident to tell the whole of Cebu that what transpired was a stabbing incident, not a shooting one, even going to the extent of dismissing complaints of gunshots.
Did he think it would be easier to escape culpability if the weapon used to kill an inmate inside the jail was a bladed weapon—jail officers did say, the day after, they saw an ice pick after the incident—and not a gun?
Still, Ramas couldn’t have been playing alone. Even if he was, there were other people inside the jail. At least one of them must have witnessed what happened.
I haven’t been inside the jail, but I assume the basketball court is outside. In the middle of the facility. Surrounded by cells. A guy getting stabbed, or, in this case, shot would have been hard to miss. Filipinos do have the penchant to gather around such activities.
So it’s hard to believe that Ramas, reportedly an underling of drug lord Steve Go who was killed inside the same facility last year, playing ball did not attract any attention. Heck, the guy allegedly took over Go’s drug network after the latter died. In other words, Ramas was a “Big Kahuna.”
Yet Tunacao said what he said. And when the autopsy result came out, it was Jail Warden Jessie Calumpang, not him, who faced the media and admitted that “his personnel had failed to notice that a gun had been sneaked inside” the jail. He said they were undermanned. That was why they missed the gun.
Calumpang went on to point the finger to a suspect, who allegedly had been a victim of Ramas’s constant bullying, conveniently diverting the issue away from what his deputy said the day before.