Cops kill ‘pistol-packing’ Grade 11 kid

Kian “Ian” Loyd , a Grade 11 student from Our Lady of Mount Carmel school in Caloocan City, could not even sleep alone because he was afraid of the dark, according to his father. So how, Zaldy delos Santos wondered, could his 17-year-old son have mustered the courage to shoot a policeman?

Authorities, however, claimed that the teenager was killed when he fired at policemen who were conducting a “One Time Big Time” operation against drug and crime suspects on Tuesday night.

Based on initial investigations, about a dozen members of the Police Community Precinct (PCP) 7 led by PO2 Arnes Oares were conducting “Oplan Galugad” operations around 8 p.m. in Libis Baisa, Barangay 160, when Ian fired at them with a .45-caliber pistol.

Later recovered from him were a gun, four cartridges and two sachets of what was believed to be “shabu.”

According to Chief Insp. Amor Cerillo, PCP7 commander, Ian was believed to be the runner of “Neneng” Escopino, a drug pusher on the police watch list. The teenager, however, was not on any list, he said.

The Delos Santos family insisted that Ian was not into drugs and that he didn’t have a gun. The third of four siblings, he was a “good student, a loving sibling and loved by his classmates,” Zaldy said.

‘Is that an addict’s face?’

“My son was a good boy,” he told the Inquirer, adding, as he pointed to Ian’s school ID: “He was so kind, so innocent. Look at his face. Is that the face of a drug addict?”

According to witnesses, Ian was just hanging out near his house at 8 p.m. Tuesday when two unidentified men grabbed him and took him away.

“I told him to close the sari-sari store and go to bed,” his grandmother, Violeta, said. “He went out but I had no idea that he had gone down (to the other end of the barangay).”

The witnesses’ statements seemed to jibe with the footage taken by a closed-circuit television camera shown to the Inquirer. It showed a young man believed to be Ian being dragged away by men in civilian clothes as onlookers watched.

However, Cirillo said that the person in the video was not the victim but one of their police assets.

He also confirmed that those dragging the young man away were policemen. Asked why they were in civilian clothes, Cirillo said that they were not required to be in uniform during drug operations.

“Ian doesn’t even smoke or say bad words. How could he have done what they say he did?” Zaldy asked.

“We didn’t work hard to put him in school just so he would die the way that he did,” he said. “My son was also a human being. He knew nothing. He deserved to live.”