Homesick jail escapee made recapture quite easy

Homesickness and a son’s longing for his father did him in.

Of all the places Henry Andrade could have gone to after bolting the Mandaluyong City jail with nine others, he went straight home, making it quite easy for police to track him down.

Andrade, 19, said he knew authorities would look for him at his house in Welfareville Compound, Barangay (village) Addition Hills, but that it didn’t matter to him since he only wanted to see his father again.

“I just missed him. I missed my house,” Andrade told the Inquirer Thursday following his recapture on Wednesday night.

Andrade’s arrest brought to eight the number of escaped inmates who remained at large following Tuesday’s jailbreak. Earlier, Valentino Gianan, an inmate booked for vagrancy, surrendered to the police.

A search is still on for Reynaldo Elligo, Joel Capule, Rolando Palmenco, Rommel Abarca, Gabriel Gonzales, Mark Lowie Burilla, Mark Agujo and Melgar Quinones.

The jailbreak prompted the Mandaluyong police to tighten security in the jail’s vicinity. City police chief Senior Superintendent Armando Bolalin said the three doors to the detention cells, for example, would have additional steel bars and that a closed circuit television camera would soon be installed.

He said the city government had agreed to pay for these measures but that “there is still paperwork that needs to be done.”

The Eastern Police District has begun a parallel investigation to determine the liability of the officers who were on duty at the time of the jailbreak.

Chief Inspector Numeriano Gabuya and three other jail officers, namely Senior Police Officer 1 Julius Caesar Pinera, PO3 Julius Paoyo and PO2 Dante Alariao, have been reassigned to do administrative work pending the results of the probe, Bolalin said.