A Pasay City policeman was shot dead and another officer was wounded on Thursday by one of the alleged drug users they were supposed to arrest just three blocks from City Hall.
PO1 Enrico Domingo died after being hit in the head and shoulder, while PO2 Harley Garcera sustained a shoulder wound in the incident.
According to a report to Senior Supt. Lawrence Coop, the city police chief, Domingo, Garcera and PO1 Tim Santos, all from the Special Operations Unit, were alerted around 5 p.m. to a “pot session” in a shanty on Pestañas Street, Barangay 69.
They found the shanty whose occupants included Randy Lizardo, known in the neighborhood as “Randy Demonyo,” and met his live-in partner Gemma. As they were about to enter one of the rooms, someone started shooting them from behind a curtain, hitting Domingo and Garcera.
Santos fired back but the shooter, later identified as Lizardo, and two other suspects escaped by climbing up the roofs of neighboring shanties.
When the Inquirer saw them on Friday, Lizardo’s neighbors said people in the shanty were just playing cards around the time the officers arrived. Four families shared space in the five-room structure.
Yet crime scene investigators said they recovered five sachets of “shabu” and several bullet casings at the shanty. Gemma and her 1-year-old son could no longer be found when a back-up police team arrived.
SJO3 Eduardo Garcia of the Pasay City Jail said Lizardo had been in and out of jail for robbery-holdup cases.
Barangay 69 chair Arnel Diones said Lizardo practically “grew up behind bars” and earned the moniker “Demonyo” because of his criminal record.
“When he was released last year, he told me he won’t be arrested again,” Diones said. “We thought he said it for the sake of his newborn son, but apparently he just wanted to continue a life of crime. He didn’t want to be thrown back in jail so he shot it out with the police.”