Autopsy shows boy died from fall

Van Oliver Dicang shows images he took of the river where his brother, Vaughn, was found dead. —RICHARD BALONGLONG

BAGUIO CITY—The Baguio high school student, who was found dead on Thursday six days after he was reported missing, may have fallen from a cliff based on the skull fractures he suffered, his family and the police said on Friday.

Vaughn Carl Dicang, 17, was found facedown at the shallow end of Mabatong River (not creek as earlier reported) in Barangay Balacbac Sur here.

His brother, Van Oliver, said the fall could have been an accident based on initial reports that his family gathered from an autopsy conducted on Thursday night.

But the police were also looking into the possibility that he was robbed because some items were missing from his bag, Van Oliver said.

“We were informed that the police had recovered a mobile telephone and we had yet to determine if that was Vaughn’s,” he said.

The police have not issued a statement on Dicang’s death pending the submission of the autopsy findings.

But the Dicang family said the boy lived a clean life and could not have been killed over illegal drugs, one of the speculations aired on social media. “This was not an EJK (a case of extrajudicial killing),” Van Oliver said.

Dicang’s sealed casket was scheduled to be moved to the Cathedral of the Resurrection here. His burial has not been scheduled pending the arrival of his father, a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia.

According to his brother, Dicang visited a friend in Balacbac on Sept. 1 and promised to return home at 6 p.m.

Van Oliver said the family and relatives took it upon themselves to look for Dicang all over the city.

Teams of cousins and uncles walked the streets for days, he said. Classmates at the University of Baguio Science High School also helped in the search by putting up posters.

On Sept. 7, the family participated in a Mountain Province ritual, “ag-ayag” (to call), which was performed to ask ancestral spirits about Dicang’s whereabouts.

The ritual priest narrated seeing the boy lying facedown on a bed of grass at the bottom of a cliff, Van Oliver said. —RICHARD BALONGLONG