Whatever Bianca Fontejon, and Lance Garcia ingested during Saturday’s outdoor concert at a mall in Pasay City, it had the same effect as swallowing an explosive.
“There was bleeding in the internal organs which is highly unusual in cases like these. Almost all internal organs were involved—the brain, the lungs, the liver, the intestines, the spleen and the kidneys,” National Bureau of Investigation medico legal officer Wilfredo Tierra told the Inquirer on Wednesday.
Whatever it was that they took, it was potent enough to damage all of their internal organs which carried signs of ruptured tissues or blood vessels, he said.
But what struck him the most, Tierra added, was the state of the victims’ hearts—both looked as if they had been grilled as these were a mixture of brown, red and black in color.
“It was the first time I had ever seen something like this,” said the medico legal officer who has been performing autopsies for 20 years.
He added: “This is a severe form, [at] the extreme [end] of the spectrum of a heart attack because during the conduct of the autopsy, almost all parts of the heart were involved.”
Tierra, who autopsied the victims’ bodies, earlier said that Fontejon, who was only 18 years old; and Garcia, aged 36; had died of a heart attack.
He clarified, however, on Wednesday that the two did not die solely of a heart attack, saying their deaths were unusual because all their internal organs failed.
According to Tierra, there was bleeding and swelling in the victims’ brains and large intestines while there were also signs of hemorrhage in a big portion of their lungs.
“We will take this as a whole. Heart attack was not the only cause of death. If what was taken was ingested, the whole body system was affected,” he said.
Tierra went on to say that based on the condition of their hearts, it was also the first time that the victims had suffered a heart attack. A “normal heart attack” would only change the organ’s color from pink to slight brown, not black like the victims’.
However, he declined to speculate on what had caused the bleeding, saying the NBI’s forensic division was still finalizing the report on the results of the toxicology and dangerous drugs tests.
Fontejon and Garcia were among five people who suddenly collapsed at the Closeup Forever Summer outdoor concert. All died hours later in the hospital. The autopsies conducted on two other victims, Eric Anthony Miller and Ken Migawa, showed that they suffered sudden cardiac death.