Waking up at 5 a.m. on Wednesday, 16-year-old high school student Catherine Coralde was stunned to see her brother, 19-year-old Albert, and his father, 47-year-old Felizardo, dead while hogtied and drowning in a pool of their own blood in their respective rooms in their house along N. Vidal Street, Barangay (village) Ibaba, Malabon City.
Chief Inspector Reynaldo Medina, Jr., head of the investigation unit of the Malabon Police, said the Coralde family’s house was also robbed by the still unidentified men, who fled after the killings.
“Right now, we see this as a robbery. But the question we are trying to answer now is, why kill the victims? Usually, these thieves would only tie their victims to the bed while they rummage through the victims’ belongings,” Medina said.
According to the sworn statement of Catherine, a high school student, she was sleeping inside her room on the second floor of their house when she was woken up at around 2 a.m. by a “commotion” outside the rooms of his father and brother.
“I just ignored it because I thought they were just opening the balikbayan box that Lola Coring and Tita Emma brought to our home. So I just slept again,” Catherine told the police in Filipino.
Coring and Emma Coralde had just apparently returned home after staying abroad, and brought home the balikbayan box containing the pasalubong for the family.
It was only when she woke up to go to school at around 5 a.m. when she discovered what had really happened that night. She noticed that the door of her brother’s room was open, so she entered it.
She then found her brother, engineering student Albert, tied to his bed, already dead, lying in his own pool of blood. Police said Albert’s throat was slit, and a “Good Morning” towel wrapped like a blindfold over his eyes. His belongings were scattered around the room.
Catherine then rushed to her father’s room, where she also found Felizardo, a records officer at the Civil Registry Office of the Malabon City Hall, also tied to his bed and dead, also from a slit throat. The room was also in disarray. “I tapped my father but he did not move,” she said in her statement.
After seeing this, she went down to wake up her grandmother, Coring Coralde, and to text her mother, who was sleeping with Emma in the latter’s house nearby, to drop by.
Vilma said in her sworn statement that a laptop, four cellphones, a wristwatch, and two bags, were missing from Felizardo’s and Albert’s room. Police added that a still undetermined amount of cash was also missing.
Both Catherine and Felizardo’s wife, Vilma, told the police that they thought the robbery spurred the killings and said they did not know of anyone in conflict with the victims.
“But we will still try to find out other possible motives in the incident,” Medina said.
Police are looking at two to four people as suspects in the robbery-murders.