Tribal couple in Palawan commit suicide

PUERTO PRINCESA CITY—A tribal couple living in a jungle village in southern Palawan, desperate over the husband’s failing health and inability to seek proper medical help, decided to end their suffering together by committing suicide inside their home in Brooke’s Point, Palawan.

Relatives found the bodies of Katon Lee, 48, and wife Lucinda, 42, both Palaw-an natives, on Thursday morning hanging by their necks inside their home in the remote barangay (village) of Imulnod.

The village chair, Levi Adiok, told the Inquirer by phone that the couple had forewarned their children about the suicide, but they did not take it seriously. The children are all living separately with their families.

“The children thought their parents were joking when the latter discussed in a meeting with them on Wednesday about the sharing of properties that they would leave behind,” Adiok said.

He said that based on the account of the children, their father had been suffering from an undiagnosed sickness and had been trying to find local medication to no avail.

Several times, they recalled their parents having a conversation where Katon vowed to just commit suicide if he could not find a cure for his illness that had often caused him intolerable headache.

“The mother, Lucinda, would tell her husband that if he planned to commit suicide, she would also join him,” Adiok said in the vernacular.

Adiok said the police had yet to reach the village which was too far to reach by foot from the poblacion of Brooke’s Point and with travel made more difficult by heavy rain.

The bodies were buried on Thursday in accordance with Palaw-an rituals and tradition.