MANILA, Philippines – The Quezon City police are now looking at the possibility that the carjackers who shot dead government employee Teresita Teano are from the same group to which five men they arrested two weeks ago belonged.
In a brief interview, Chief Supt. George Regis, the Quezon City Police District director, said that the two men who shot Teano on Wednesday morning may have been newly fielded “substitute players” to five suspected car thieves the QCPD-Anti Carnapping Unit arrested in consecutive operations on June 11 and 12.
This would explain why Teano’s gunmen seemed to be inexperienced. “They seemed to have shot her in panic when she fought back,” Regis pointed out, in Filipino. He added that the lack of carnapping cases in the days that followed seemed to show the perpetrators might have been alarmed at “the unexpected, unplanned” killing.
The QCPD has been “hot on the suspects’ trail,” he said, adding that the pursuit has gone beyond Metro Manila.
In a phone interview, Insp. Rodel Marcelo, chief of the QCPD Criminal Investigation and Detection Unit, said the car jackers seemed to have fled to the provinces with Teano’s car.
Teano, an administrative assistant at the Land Registration Authority, was on her way to the Brahma Kumaris meditation center on Kamuning road when at least two men took over her red Hyundai Accent and shot her as she cried for help.
The weekend before the crime, the QCPD arrested suspected car thieves Joey Villanueva, Jonathan Rodriguez, Francis Briones, Alexander Emmanuel Aquino and Rommel Flores, in consecutive pursuit operations in Quezon City and Parañaque. The QCPD were following up on, and were able to recover, two Mitsubishi Monteros stolen separately at gunpoint, also from women drivers, on June 9 and 11.