Autopsy report links man to wife’s ‘suicide’

HE SAID she killed herself but the autopsy report said otherwise.

Authorities have arrested a man who strangled his live-in partner in Pasig City last week and tried to make it appear a suicide.

The police said that Emerson Macalam was taken into police custody on Sunday. He now faces a murder charge for the death of Amalia Piagola inside their house on West Bank Road in Barangay Maybunga on Nov. 2 over a still undetermined reason.

Case investigator SPO1 Ricardo Allapitan said that when Macalam brought the 32-year-old victim to Pasig City General Hospital, he told doctors that he had just come home from work when he saw Piagola hanging by a rope from the ceiling and gasping for air.

The mother of two was confined at the hospital’s intensive care unit although she died two days later.

According to the police, the victim’s older sister, Maria Lita, asked that the victim’s body be autopsied without Macalam’s knowledge because she didn’t believe the 39-year-old suspect’s story.

She told the police that several hours after her sister was taken to the hospital, she went to the couple’s house and found it in disarray, with broken liquor bottles littering the floor. She also noted that her sister’s body bore several cigarette burns.

The police said that the suspect, who works as a security guard, left his 2-year-old child and three-month-old baby when he learned that his sister-in-law had requested an autopsy. The children were later placed in Maria Lita’s custody.

Based on the results, the victim died of asphyxia by manual strangulation, prompting Maria Lita to go to the police on Friday.

The suspect was arrested around 1 p.m. Sunday on E. Santos Street in Barangay Palatiw when he agreed to meet Maria Lita so he could see his children.

Under questioning, he denied that he killed his live-in partner although he admitted that he would sometimes beat her up whenever he got drunk, the police said.