By Rex Catubig

 

FOREWORD: By a stroke of serendipity, I came across this piece I wrote in the Village Voice Newsmagazine of Cesar Duque, which detailed the assassination of a police officer in a town then infamous for unsolved killings. It’s been almost four decades, but with the spate of deaths by gunmen that has gone unabated, it’s as timely as the next breaking news.

This is my preface for the accompanying field report—recreating the ordinariness of a routine morning leading to a horrific incident.

Tuesday morning, March 3, was not unlike any other in the Quilana household in the remote barangay of Maliwer in Bayambang. At daybreak, the nondescript concrete and wood house was already a rustic mise-en-scene of morning rituals: Wife Fely was working miracles with last night’s leftovers, with the pungent smell of dried fish frying and garlic rice steaming, spilling out of the kitchen and wafting into the dewy air outside through the half-open windows.

Washing sleep off their faces, four of the kids, the eldest girl and three boys, skittered about as they prepared for school, while the youngest girl, aged 3, tarried on the sleeping mat amid the tangle of unmade blankets and undraped mosquito nets.

Efren, the father, though already awake, tried vainly to catch a few more winks but soon yanked himself out of bed, and after the usual admonition to his children not to be late for class, himself started getting dressed in his fatigue PC uniform. He tucked in his .45 caliber pistol and slung on his shoulder the M16 rifle.

Task Sgt Quilana is proud of himself, not just the way all soldiers are, but because of his status now—as OIC Station Commander of the Bayambang PC-INP Unit. He was named to the post only a year and two months ago, and he looks upon the promotion with pride and as a challenge. It was, after all, every soldier’s dream.

With the rattle in the house now reduced to the youngest child’s tantrums. And the rest finally off to school, Sgt Quilana sat down with wife Fely at the dining table and without much ceremony ate breakfast together. Gulping down his coffee, he bade his wife goodbye and mounted his motorcycle. As he revved up his bike, he hollered over the roar of the engine to remind his wife not to let in any stranger to the house. Then off he went on his way to his office at the police station in Poblacion Bayambang.

Over the months, this was a scene that repeated itself daily without much variation in the Quilana household. But little did Quilana know that today, the ordinariness and routine would cease to be.

Ten minutes and five kilometers later, just after the boundary of Maliwer and Hermosa at the Agno River Flood Control Dike, and near a lot where the Quilana’s former house used to stand, seven masked men suddenly materialized from the ipil-ipil and banana-lined roadside and fired at the cruising Quilana. One of the bullets pierced his chest while another lodged below his right ear.

In a matter of seconds, at 8:15 am, Quilana’s 40 years and 18-year military career along with his lifetime dreams, were summarily snuffed out. Even his .45 caliber pistol and M16 rifle, symbols of his soldiery, were unceremoniously and cruelly snatched from his person.

In the stillness following the gunfire, the killers casually walked away towards the Agno River, and as they fled, the air reverberated with the shout: “Mabuhay ang NPA!”.

Gay Samson, our Village Voice newsmagazine reporter, who covered the incident, wrote: “On the spot where T/Sgt Efren Q Quilana was ambushed and killed…now lies a makeshift cross fashioned out of Ipil-ipil branches. The blood of the victim had caked upon the parched ground, serving as a crimson epitaph to the morning murder”.

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