Mom slits throat of 6-year-old son with kitchen knife

What dark forces drove a mother to slit the throat of her 6-year-old son?

It was unthinkable, according to those who saw Rosalia Galuran, 36, holding a blood-stained kitchen knife next to her dead son Mark Justin in Antipolo City on Thursday.

Police said the killing happened at around 5 p.m. inside the house of Analiza Francisco, a widow, in Sitio Sampaguita, Barangay Sta. Cruz, where the mother and her child were temporarily staying.

Chief Insp. Zaldy Aquino, deputy police chief of Antipolo City, said Francisco “played Good Samaritan” and offered food and shelter to the Galurans after seeing them sleeping on the pavement at the city public market on Wednesday.

Before the killing was discovered, the boy was heard pleading with his mother to drop the knife, according to Aquino.

“‘Nanay, kutsilyo ‘yan! ‘Wag! (Mother, that’s a knife! Don’t do it!),’” Aquino said, quoting the boy’s cries as heard by the neighbors.

The alarmed neighbors called for Francisco, who was then at her sister’s house nearby. When she opened the door, she saw Galuran holding the knife and her son covered in a blanket.

Francisco rushed back to the street to call for help, but “the boy was already dead when the police and the barangay officials arrived,” Aquino said.

The officer said the mother appeared to be mentally unstable. “She told us the boy was not her son but the son of God,” he said.

Galuran’s father, Ramon, said that his daughter Analiza had been admitted once in a mental institution after she and her son were abandoned by her husband.