BAGUIO CITY – City Mayor Mauricio Domogan has announced a P100,000 reward for information and arrest of the suspects in the brutal killing last week of a male 16- year old high school student in one of the public high schools.
“It was possible that the perpetrators of this heinous deed were addicts, ” Domogan said. “Imagine walang kalaban-laban ang batang ito na gusto lang mag-aral”.
He said that he already ordered Sr.Supt. Ramir Saculles, city police director, to effect the immediate apprehension of the killers. In a radio interview, Saculles said that the police are already gathering information on the identity or identities of the suspects.
Kenneth Velasco was walking to school Tuesday morning on an alley along Naguilian road, near the Baguio City Hall and the main station of the Baguio police, when the assailant or assailants held him up, took his cellular phone and two-hundred peso cash and fled after stabbing him 40 times with an ice-pick.
Velasco of Sunnyside Fairview barangay here was rushed to the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center but was pronounced dead on arrival by attending physicians.
A stall owner along the alley, Monina Pascua Fernandez, 42, told police that she was standing at the entrance of her store when a male minor wearing dark jacket, black lower pants with a back pack passed by her and even glanced at her twice before he hurriedly walked descending towards the barangay hall.
She claimed that a few seconds after the unidentified minor passed by, she heard somebody shouting and then saw the 16-year old victim in school uniform sprawled on the pavement swimming on his own blood.
The Baguio police, which has placed the murder as its top priority, were able to locate a CCTV camera owned by Labsan Barangay and are studying it for possible identification of the perpetrator and his accomplices.
The Velasco killing is one of several murders in the city that remained unsolved.
On December 1, 2015, wealthy Baguio Chinese-Filipino businessman Henry Lao, 68, owner of Tiongsan Bazar, Enrico Hotel, and a trucking service, was discovered dead with 34 stab wounds inside his own home in Barangay Ferdinand here.
Despite the hefty reward dangled in the solution of Lao’s murder, police have not identified the assailant.
Also on June 15, this year, 65-year old foreign exchange money changer, Larry Oliva Haya, Sr., had just alighted from a passenger jeepney and was heading home at Purok 5, Bakakeng Norte,when two armed suspects gunned him down and took at least P3-million in local currency he was carrying in a bag.
Upon sensing the commotion, his brother, Randolph, 67, came out of their house but was fired upon by the suspects. Haya, Sr., died in the hospital while his brother survived the attack.
Though a bounty of one hundred thousand pesos (P100, 000.00) was offered, no positive development on the robbery and murder had emerged and police have yet to identify the killer.
Only on November 1, a 51-year old Korean trader Jeon Ju Seo alias Henry Seo, 51, died while his live-in partner was hurt after a still unnamed gunman shot them at Upper Pinget, here.
Seo and his partner, Chris Joy Dichoso Jerez, were on board their vehicle heading home along Upper Pinget when the gunman who positioned himself at the right side of the road fired at them several times. The Korean national was hit on the different parts of his body while her companion sustained injuries.
Though even police from Korea sent their investigators, the case remained unsolved .
The murders, aside from drug-related killings that has reached a dozen since July. The police never admitted they owned some of the killings but blamed drug syndicates murdering their own members involved in the illegal trade. Thom Picana/Northbound Philippines News