The demonization of David Lim Jr.

There had been far worse offenses committed by far more despicable criminals in Cebu but I have never in the more recent past witnessed public outrage more powerful and longer lasting than the one many people expressed over last week’s shooting of a male nurse in what was admittedly a case of road rage.

A video recording of the incident that has since become viral shows David Lim Jr. and Ephraim Nuñal alternately pointing fingers at each other before the shooting. Although no voices can be heard, it was clear that what they had was not a friendly chat.

All the shots were fired towards the lower part of Nuñal’s body. The victim’s injuries, all located in his lower extremities, confirm the direction of the gunfire. Lim could have finished off the victim when the latter staggered after being hit but he fled instead in his car with his girlfriend.

This is no brief for Lim, whom or any member of whose family I do not know from Adam. He has a competent lawyer in Orlando Salatandre to do that for him. I am merely pointing out the huge disparity between the crime that Lim is being accused of and the “punishment” that the public has dealt him.

This is the same public from whom you haven’t heard a whimper when scores of people were killed under mysterious, to say the least, circumstances since the start of the government’s war on drugs. What makes this road rage shooting so repugnant to our suddenly awake conscience? Why have media, both the traditional and the social, descended upon him as ferociously as vultures swoop down on a carcass?

Other than the shooting, Lim has had no his- tory of violence. He has apparently kept himself within his circle of friends because we haven’t heard of him until he went into a rage that fateful early morning. Is it because he happens to be the nephew of Peter Lim, who has been accused by the President of being into drugs but who has not been charged until now?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Lim is not criminally accountable for what he had done. It is clear in the video who shot and wounded whom but let us leave it to the court to pronounce his guilt or innocence and, when appropriate, impose the punishment.

But he does not deserve the demonization that he is being subjected to, for Christ’s sake. We should not use his case to wash our own individual conscience of guilt. Our self-righteousness is appalling.

I had a friend who suffered the same fate some 19 years ago. An ex-soldier pointed a gun to his neck but he was able to shove the weapon away before it could explode. A bystander was hit instead.

My friend ran away but stumbled. The gunman shot and wounded him in the buttock, the slug finding its way to his intestine, a portion of which had to be cut when he was operated on. The gunman himself was subdued and killed by a responding policeman.

Notwithstanding this, the prosecution inexplicably charged my friend with murder. With media at the forefront, the public then went on a frenzy attacking and condemning him. The court eventually acquitted him but the experience so mortally wounded him, he died not long after his vindication.

Am I seeing the same pattern again?

We should not use his case to wash our own individual conscience of guilt