Bark is worse than her bite

With her partner Ian Charles Griffiths free, Bella Ruby Santos has one less thing to worry about, which is her own safety. Despite the arrest warrants issued against her and Griffiths, she has merrily avoided arrest, staying two steps ahead of the police.

The Cebu police admitted as much, saying that Bella has done her own monitoring of law enforcers and managed to avoid arrest to the bewilderment of the public, which expects our region’s finest to bring her in, cuffs and all, back to Cebu considering the resources and personnel at their disposal.

There were suggestions that Bella was somewhere in Central Visayas, sunning in a beach spot or taking a breather in Mindanao. Or, in a worse-case scenario, she may have slipped out of the country, through the famous Southern backdoor, despite the issuance of a hold-departure order against her.

Just because she’s hiding, however, doesn’t mean she can’t fight back. Just for kicks, her lawyer threatened to file a multimillion-peso damage suit against the police and witnesses that they tapped in their case against her and Griffiths.

The move may have been copied from another Cebuana, Karen Esdrelon and her Norwegian partner Sven-Erik Berger, who filed a damage suit against former Cebu provincial police chief Erson Digal and others for implicating them in the Ellah Joy kidnap-murder case.

But while Esdrelon and Burger enjoy the privilege of being cleared of criminal culpability, Santos and Griffiths have yet to prove their innocence.

What are they trying to pull here?

The multimillion-peso damage suit is akin to shooting blanks in the false hope that the police would be scared enough to back down. Far from calling their bluff, the Cebu police welcomed the move, saying it would give them a chance to serve the arrest warrants on the couple.

Speculations abound. What if this expensive damage suit was cooked up to as a smokescreen for Bella to quietly leave the country? This possibility cannot be discounted especially since Bella’s lawyer has failed to prove their contention that Santos is ready to show up to face her accusers in court.

More importantly, why can’t the Cebu police find Bella, whose tall, flamboyant profile has been widely publicized. She isn’t exactly a wallflower.

It’s up to Santos and Griffiths if they want to become fugitives.

But it’s the job of the police not to let a woman single-handedly confound their best surveillance.

For all their threats to file a multimillion-peso damage suit, Bella’s bark is worse than her bite.