Mom to missing boy, 14: Come home
As relatives of Carl Angelo Arnaiz buried their dead yesterday, the search continued for his 14-year-old companion on the night he went missing.
Reynaldo de Guzman, a Grade 5 student called Kulot, liked hanging out with friends in their Cainta neighborhood, according to his mother Lina Gabriel.
Distraught and with little sleep, Gabriel has been visiting police stations, social welfare offices, and yes, even funeral parlors in Cainta, Antipolo and Caloocan City where Arnaiz was found dead last month from multiple gunshots.
Caloocan police claimed Arnaiz had robbed a taxi driver along C3 Road in Navotas on Aug. 17, and had resisted arrest, prompting police to shoot him dead. The police desk officer who took the alleged robbery complaint claimed he failed to take down the address and other details about the taxi driver, whose whereabouts are also unknown.
Through tears, Gabriel lamented yesterday that while Arnaiz was about to be buried, her son still had not come home.
“If he can hear me now, I hope he comes home,” Gabriel said in Filipino. “If he could only come home alive, if only I could hug him.”
She said she did not know why her son, who takes odd jobs to earn some money after school, went out with Arnaiz on that fateful night of Aug. 17. She stressed that her son had no vices.
Despite warnings about being shot herself, and despite being dead tired aggravated by her lack of food and sleep, Gabriel said she planned to go next to Navotas to look for her son.
Gabriel expressed confidence that her son is still alive but is being detained against his will. In a previous interview, she urged her son to go home accompanied by the media.
Rody: Bring media in raids
President Duterte ordered the police yesterday to conduct drug raids with media in tow, to avoid criticisms of abuses.
“Now this is an order: bring the media and let them go ahead of you so that they can get the story from the beginning to end. If you just let them in after the gun battle, they would say (police) just planted the guns,” Duterte said. “Do not make raids now without the media. But see to it… if it’s a camera, if there’s a reporter, see to it that they are there from the beginning up to the end.” –