With seven companions serving as lookouts, the designated shooter casually walked into the tent and found their target, 17-year-old Emmanuel Lorica, asleep next to his girlfriend.
In a matter of seconds, their job was done—and they were gone.
The Dec. 6 attack that killed the minor at an evacuation center for fire victims in Barangay Rosario, Pasig City, jolted the community for its sheer brazenness, prompting local officials to launch their own investigation.
The case received special attention from the village chief also because Lorica used to be a government scholar until he allegedly became a “drug courier.”
“I initiated a probe because this is the first time a minor was shot dead in my barangay. It’s under my watch and I have to know,” Barangay Rosario chair Aquilino Dela Cruz said.
A report submitted to Senior Supt. Orlando Yebra Jr., the acting Pasig police chief, said Lorica was asleep in one of the eight tents set up at the barangay’s covered court to shelter 15 families displaced by a fire that hit Rodriguez Compound in Rosario’s Tramo area on Dec. 5.
Quoting eyewitnesses, Dela Cruz said at least eight armed men wearing masks arrived at the area around 11 p.m. on Dec. 6, with one of them going straight into Lorica’s tent and shooting him in cold blood.
The gunmen “moved about freely” despite the presence of many onlookers, including four village watchmen posted at the evacuation center, the official noted.
“The manner of his death was very different from the others. There were many people there and yet no one reacted. The suspects knew their target,” Dela Cruz told the Inquirer.
A police report on the incident categorized Lorica as a drug user and pusher who was included in Barangay Rosario’s drug watch list. Dela Cruz, however, negated the report and told Inquirer the that Lorica was not on the list. An arson suspect arrested for the Dec. 5 fire, 26-year-old Peter John Andaman, allegedly worked for the same drug peddling group that used Lorica as a courier.
Before Lorica was killed, Dela Cruz said, he knew the teenager to be a bright student at Eusebio High School who had received educational assistance from the barangay government.
But when he started asking around after his death, Dela Cruz said he had gathered that Lorica recently started serving as a drug courier and were apparently influenced by his girlfriend’s relatives who were also suspected drug pushers.
Coming from a broken home, Lorica had no known relatives in Pasig and thus lived with his girlfriend’s family while his mother worked in Dubai. His body had been brought to his hometown in the Bicol region, Dela Cruz said.