Carjacking victim’s father wants to face son’s killer

The father of slain car dealer Venson Evangelista on Sunday said he wanted to face his son’s alleged gunman, Rolando Talban, who was arrested last week in Cavite province.

“I will face him and show him pictures of my son’s gruesome death. Maybe that will make him feel guilty,” Arsenio Evangelista told the Inquirer in a phone interview.

Talban, the supposed hit man of the notorious Dominguez carjacking group, was arrested on Wednesday morning in Barangay Burol 1, Dasmariñas City.

Wanted for the murder of Venson and that of another car dealer, Emerson Lozano, he tried to elude arrest by introducing himself to the arresting officers as Wilson Mendoza, a native of Nasugbu, Batangas.

However, the police were able to confirm his real identity based on a tattoo on his left shoulder and a scar from an old gunshot wound, the source said.

Members of the Philippine National Police’s Highway Patrol Group had put up a P600,000 bounty for the arrest of Talban, the primary suspect in the murders of Venson and Lozano whose charred bodies were recovered in Central Luzon in

January 2011.

Talban is also wanted for the murder of Teresita Teaño in Kamuning, Quezon City, also last year.

It was also in Dasmariñas City where the bodies of Alfred Mendiola, the slain star witness against the car theft gang, and of two other men, were found in May.

The Dasmariñas police were responding to reports about a shooting incident in Barangay Burol 1 but when they arrived at the scene, they found Talban being held by an angry mob which had also mauled him, according to a city police report obtained by the Inquirer.

This was after he tried to steal a silver Toyota Innova from its owner and left one of its passengers wounded.