Police eye involvement of nuns’ driver in robbery at convent

MANILA, Philippines—A stay-in employee of a convent in Quezon City is now suspected of conniving with robbers who  forcibly took the convent’s payroll while some nuns and employees were counting the money during Holy Week.

However, Efren Padilla, stay-in driver at the Convent of the Holy Spirit on Poinsettia Street in Barangay (village) Immaculate Conception left a day after the March 26 robbery, supposedly to go home to Pangasinan, and has not returned since, police said.

Inspector Alan de la Cruz, theft and robbery section chief of the Quezon City Police District’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Unit, said another employee claimed seeing the driver talking with a man after the robbery.

“The man that the driver was talking to turned out to be one of the armed robbers,” Dela Cruz said.

Dela Cruz said the police will file criminal charges against Padilla based on circumstantial evidence and the account of another employee linking him to the robbers.

“Based on the statements of the witnesses, the conspiracy of the convent driver was clearly established,” he added.

On March 26 at 2:15 p.m., five armed men barged inside the convent while employees and nuns were counting the payroll money that was delivered earlier by an armored van.

The convent lost a total of P417,934.43 payroll money, petty cash and foreign exchange as well as two cell phones of the accounting staff.

Dela Cruz said the now-missing Padilla  aroused suspicion after the nuns and other employees recalled seeing him outside the convent prior to the heist, as if waiting for someone. As the driver waited in the sun, five men and a woman were seen walking in his direction, witnesses said.

The driver was also spotted talking to someone on his cell phone despite the extreme heat.

When shown a computerized sketch of the suspect based on the description of a nun, the employee said the sketch resembled the man he saw with Padilla.

De la Cruz noted that the only open gate of the convent, located on Betty Go Street, was where Padilla was seen waiting in the heat prior to the robbery.

Police investigators asked Padilla to turn over his cell phone to examine its contents and text messages, but the driver gave his cell phone without the SIM card, claiming that the phone got soaked in the laundry.

In his defense, Padilla said he was outside the convent at that time as he was looking for a therapist to massage his swollen foot.

De la Cruz said the driver was told he would have undergo a lie detector test, but the driver left the convent on the night of March 27, supposedly to go home to Pangasinan, and has not surfaced since then.