THE WAKE for the Lelis brothers in Paco, Manila. Dexter Cabalza
ELLA Jane Guevarra was worried when her partner Rommel Lelis failed to return home in Paco, Manila, on Sept. 3, the day he promised to come back from Cavite province where he had signed up for a job as a carpenter.
Lelis, his brother Rolando, and two other men from their neighborhood were supposedly hired to build a police officer’s house in Bacoor.
Guevarra finally found Lelis at a funeral home in Las Piñas, his skull crushed and his body riddled with gunshot wounds.
“I was hurt when the police and the media reported that my husband was a gun-for-hire. He was not,” Guevarra insisted, saying the man she had lived with for the last two years would have told her if he had this other criminal source of income.
Rommel and Rolando Lelis were two of the three suspects killed in what the Las Piñas police said was a shoot-out on Coastal Road around 1 a.m. of Sept. 4.
The officer assigned to the case, PO3 Christian Yanga, said the Lelis brothers and another still-unidentified suspect were in the gray Toyota Avanza (TGB 477) that set off a road chase after avoiding a police checkpoint at the corner of Real Street and Naga Road in Barangay Pulang Lupa I.
They allegedly opened fire on the pursuing officers as they fled toward C-5 Extension before they were cornered and shot dead on Coastal.
The vehicle was later found carrying a fourth person: A man who apparently was killed much earlier. The police said his head was wrapped in packaging tape and next to the body were two sachets of “shabu” and a placard calling him a “pusher and thief.”
When Yanga last replied to an Inquirer query on Friday, he said the vehicle’s owner was still being checked since the Land Transportation Office needed two to three days to work on it.
Yanga also declined to give the name of the fourth fatality but said he was a Las Piñas resident.
Rolando also allegedly had a pack of “shabu” in his pocket when he and his sibling were killed.
The Lelises’ neighbors in Paco said that, as far as they know, the brothers stopped being drug users in 2015.
Rommel, 34, was a father of six children, two of them with Guevarra, his third partner. Rolando, 29, had two children.
Linda Carrascal, the brothers’ aunt who is also a barangay official in Paco, said the siblings did not surrender under the “Oplan Tokhang” antidrug campaign because they thought they were “safe” since they had ceased being drug users long before the Duterte administration launched its crackdown on narcotics.
Should be tools, not guns
But according to the police, recovered from the brothers after the Sept. 4 incident were a shotgun, a 9-mm pistol, and a .38-cal. revolver, as well as gloves, a knife, bonnets, ropes and packaging tape.
“Where are their hammers and other tools? Those were the things that should have been found inside the vehicle,” cried Guevarra.
The Las Piñas police said they were investigating whether the three slain suspects were part of a drug syndicate or a group of hitmen working for one.
Asuncion, the brothers’ mother, shared Guevarra’s anguish over her sons being branded as hired killers.
“Is it easier for the conscience to accept the death of my children because they were hired killers or (working for) drug lords? They don’t know them. No one bothered to ask us,” Asuncion said.
According to Robert, the younger brother of Rommel and Rolando, a certain Daniel Ramos asked their relative Geronimo Hizon in late August to look for people who could work as carpenters for a police officer who was building a house in Bacoor, Cavite.
Ramos—who Robert said also used the alias “Michael”— told them that his “boss” was looking for workers with one specific trait: They should have “many tattoos on their bodies to scare away people.”
According to the neighbors, they knew Ramos to be a pedicab driver but they also suspected him to be a “police asset” or informant. He has also disappeared since.
Hizon accepted the job and also recommended the “heavily tattooed” Rommel and Rolando—who were then working as vegetable vendors at Paco market—and their 25-year-old neighbor Vergel Bartonico.
Robert said he was lucky to have turned down the offer for he was really tired on the day he heard about it. Otherwise, there would be three caskets at his family residence, he said.
The Lelis brothers, Bartonico and Hizon left Manila for Bacoor on Aug. 29, carrying only their carpentry tools and just enough cash for transportation. They told their families they would return on Sept. 3.
When that Saturday arrived, one of Guevarra’s neighbors reported to her that he saw Rommel being forced by a police officer into a gray van at a checkpoint at the corner of Taft and Quirino Avenues in Manila around 4:30 p.m.
Last seen at checkpoint
The neighbor, who spoke to the Inquirer on the condition that his name be withheld, said he was also accosted by an officer at the checkpoint for not wearing a helmet while driving his motorbike.
When he looked at his side mirror, the neighbor said he saw Rommel and two other men—one of them half-naked— inside the van. “I thought he was just being questioned by the police and that he would be released later,” he said.
He thought of helping Rommel explain to the officers but got too scared to approach the van.
The neighbor said the van he saw at the checkpoint and the Toyota Avanza that figured in the Coastal Road incident appeared to be the same vehicle.
By nightfall of Sept. 3, none of the four newly-hired carpenters had returned to their homes in Paco.
At 9:16 p.m., Asuncion’s cell phone received a text message from an unfamiliar number: It was purportedly about Hizon asking the Lelis family to bail him and Bartonico out after they were detained by members of the Las Piñas Police Community Precinct (PCP) 7 in Pilar village.
But Asuncion got to read the message at 2:10 a.m. on Sept. 4.
By then, unknown to their family, Rommel and Rolando were already dead on Coastal Road, about 10 kilometers from PCP 7.
After receiving more text messages about Hizon and Bartonico’s detention, Guevarra and Asuncion went to PCP 7, hoping to find the two men and ask them about Rommel and Rolando’s whereabouts.
An officer at the precinct, however, told them that PCP 7 was not holding any detainees since it doesn’t even have a jail. They were told to check the Las Piñas police headquarters instead.
The source of the text messages, however, insisted that Hizon and Bartonico were being hidden inside one of the rooms of the precinct. The women were not allowed to look into the rooms.
“We were exhausted from the long trip and the police officers were pointing us to different places, from a barangay hall to another police precinct,” Guevarra said. “I don’t know if they are hiding them.”
Signs of torture
BROTHERS Rolando (upper photo) and Rommel Lelis did not surrender under “Oplan Tokhang” because, according to a relative, they already felt “safe” since they stopped using drugs last year. Contributed photos
When the women reached the headquarters, they met Yanga and were told about the four bodies recovered from a shoot-out and brought to People’s funeral home on J. Tionquiao Street.
“At first, I did not want to go to the funeral home. I could not believe that they would die just like that, working as carpenters,” Guevarra said.
The shocked wife and mother finally saw the bodies: Rommel’s skull was crushed, while Rolando had two bullet holes in his head and stitches on his hand and face.
“Their bodies showed signs that they were tortured, not killed in a shoot-out,” Guevarra said.
The anonymous sender of the messages kept communicating with Guevarra. The last message sent around 7 p.m. on Sept. 4 said Hizon and Bartonico were still alive but might be killed later. But the sender claimed to be clueless as to who killed the Lelis brothers.
Hizon and Bartonico were still missing as of Sunday.
The Hizon and Lelis family members have yet to return to the Las Piñas police to give their statements, unsure if they could still trust the authorities.
They started to do their own investigation by looking for more people who could tell where Rommel and his companions were last seen alive. They also hope to obtain closed-circuit television footage from establishments in Las Piñas and Manila that can help.
“We want justice, but we do not know where we will get it. We are afraid of the police because they may get back at us and kill us,” Guevarra said.