‘He did not deserve to die,’ says daughter of slain exec

DAVAO City—He was not just a Sagittarius Mines Inc.(SMI) executive, he was my father, Cindel Jane Bual, the youngest of the three children of Cristituto Bual told the Inquirer Saturday.

“What I wanted to voice out to his killer, he was also my father. Is working with SMI enough reason for them to kill him? His being an SMI man is not everything about my father,” Cindel Jane said.

Bual, 53, an offsite land acquisition superintendent for the SMI, was gunned down at 5:50 a.m. Friday while he and his wife Melanie were walking along Isarog Road near their home at the Central Park Subdivision.

His assailant was identified only as a man about 5’7” tall and wearing a long sleeve camouflage and a brown baseball cap. The killer, who shot Bual three times at close range, withdrew on board a waiting black Honda Wave motorcycle, driven by a companion, police reported.

Three wounds in the head caused Bual’s instant death.

“He did not deserve to die,” said Cindel Jane, a fourth year electronic communication engineering student at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She said she heard the news at the UP Diliman dormitory at 10 a.m. Friday and immediately asked school permission to go home to Davao.

“He was a good father, a good boss and a colleague,” she said. “Even those who worked with him in his previous jobs, still remember.”

Bual was also the area manager for Mindanao for the Peace and Equity Foundation (PEF) before he joined the SMI.

“Kung meron man siyang nagawang mali, bakit barilin siya? Madali naman siyang kausapin (If he ever did anything wrong, why shoot him? It is easy to talk to him),” she said.

She said the last time she talked with her father was on his 53rd birthday on Sept. 7, when she greeted him through Skype. The last time she was in Davao was in August this year because she only goes home during semestral breaks.

She remembered her father as a “jolly” man, who tried to make everyone happy, and broke down when she remembered how happy they were last Christmas, when he played Ursula in the Little Mermaids during the company’s costume party.

“Whatever he did, he was only working hard for us,” she said. “He did not only send his children to a good school, he also helped my cousins.”

Police recovered two spent cartridges of .45-cal. pistol from the crime scene.

She said she was aware that even from the start when he was working for SMI, his father had tried his best to meet the expectations, especially of residents affected by the mining project.

“There have been people opposed to mining,” she said. “But my father tried his best to meet the expectations of everyone when he was still assigned in the land acquisition department of SMI.”—Germelina Lacorte, Inquirer Mindanao