Bad hair day: Mad customer kills barber in Iloilo town

ILOILO CITY—A man who disliked his fresh haircut hacked the barber to death in Calinog town, 48 kilometers from this city, on Wednesday, police said.

Charlie Agustino, 48, died from multiple hack wounds after he was attacked by Benjie Lozada, 36, inside Rammy’s barbershop at the public market. The assailant was believed to be mentally disturbed.

The victim, who had worked as a barber for seven years and was also a pastor of the local Baptist church, died while being treated at Calinog District Hospital.

Senior Police Officer 1 Elmer Sanchez of the Calinog police station said Lozada had his hair cut by Agustino in the morning. At around 3 p.m., Lozada, now armed with a bolo, returned to the place, looked for the barber, then went on a rampage.

Sanchez said the assailant immediately went to the police station on foot to surrender after the killing. Lozada appeared calm and still had the bloodstained bolo in his hand when he arrived just as a team of policemen was about to go to the crime scene.

“He told us that he did not like the way his hair was cut,” Sanchez told the Philippine Daily Inquirer on the phone on Thursday.

Lozada is believed to be mentally disturbed and recently had a nervous breakdown, the officer added.

According to Police Officer 1 Mark Warren Castillo, Lozada said he was teased about his “uneven” haircut upon reaching home and that he had to use “two mirrors” to check if it was really that bad.

An enraged Lozada then took a motorcycle back to the barbershop, which was about 10 km away, Castillo said.

As of Thursday, Lozada was being held in a separate cell away from the two other detainees at the station.

Unsatisfied customers

Such a case of a bad hair day ending in mayhem is not without precedent.

In March 1997, Romeo Adrales of Manila, fed up with the teasing over his haircut, returned to his barber, Bonifacio Delgado, and stabbed him to death with a butcher knife, according to a report by The Associated Press.

“(The) killing apparently was triggered by too many repetitions of the standard Philippine wisecrack for a bad trim: ‘Is the barber still alive?’” the US news agency reported.

In the United States, 20-year-old Joshua Robert Schwartz was arrested in January 2008 for reportedly stabbing a 60-year-old barber in San Diego, California, who gave him a haircut he considered unacceptable. The barber survived.

In one case in India, it was the barber who ended up silencing a complaining customer.

In June 20, 2011, the Indo Asian News Service (IANS) reported that a barber in the Guntur district of Andrah Pradesh state stabbed a client to death “after the latter pulled him up for not cutting his hair properly.”

The barber got angry when the customer, unsatisfied with his haircut, returned to the shop and picked up an argument with him. The barber then stabbed him with a scissor, the IANS report said. With a report from Schatzi Quodala, Inquirer Research