Double celebration: Jaypee Bertes Jr.’s christening day was also his first birthday. —JHESSET O. ENANO
Over a year after he became one of the first casualties in the government’s bloody and controversial war on drugs, Jaypee Bertes lives on — in the son he had always wanted but never got to see.
On Sunday, Jaypee Jr. was baptized at a church in Manila with his mother, Harra Kazuo, and other family members in attendance. It was a double celebration as it was also the boy’s first birthday.
For Kazuo, it has been a long and grueling few months since the death of her partner, Bertes, and his father, Renato, while in the custody of the Pasay City police.
“I always ask myself: Am I up to this?” she told the Inquirer on Sunday. “I can’t really say how I have managed to face life’s challenges but I draw strength from my children.”
Bertes, 28, and 47-year-old Renato were among the first casualties when President Rodrigo Duterte launched an all-out war on drugs right after he took office on June 30.
Shortly before midnight on July 6, 2016, police offiers barged into Bertes’ house, a tiny room in the slums of Pasay City, and demanded that he show them where the “shabu” was hidden.
Lawmen shoved aside Kazuo, who was then five months pregnant with Jaypee Jr., as they ransacked the house. Even her six-year-old daughter was not spared as a policeman lifted her diaper to check for contraband.
Premonition of sorts?
The police took Bertes with them and his father, fearing that something bad would happen to his son, insisted on accompanying him to Station 4.
The next day, Kazuo visited the pair and saw signs that they had been beaten in the few hours they were in detention.
Hours later, Bertes and Renato would wind up dead after they reportedly tried to grab the guns of PO2 Alipio Balo Jr. and PO1 Michael Tomas.
Kazuo admitted that her partner had used drugs occasionally and even sold shabu to make a little money on the side.
But all of that changed when Bertes learned that he was going to have a son. “He promised to change. He said he didn’t want to die because he was going to become a father again,” she added.
Alternative version
The police, on the other hand, have a different version of events.
They said they chanced upon Bertes and his father gambling in the neighborhood and took the pair to the police station after drugs were found in their possession.
While in detention, father and son tried to get a police officer’s gun and they were shot as a result.
Lawyer Frederick Mikhail Farolan who represents Kazuo said that the murder case remains pending in a Pasay City court while the two policemen have gone into hiding.
Kazuo told the Inquirer that she and her husband initially wanted to name their son “Prince Ezekiel” which means “God strengthens.” But after Bertes died, Kazuo found it fitting to name her youngest after him.
“Every single day, I show him photos of his father and he calls out, ‘Papa, Papa.’ I tell him everything about his father and I tell him that I’m sorry that he couldn’t be here to guide him because he was taken away so early from us,” she said.
She will tell him of his father’s fate when he comes of age. But for “Anna,” their four-year-old daughter, her papa is just asleep, Kazuo said.
As she testified in the Senate hearings on extrajudicial killings in November 2016, the single mother became the face of grieving widows in the drug war. But behind the brave front was the constant fear for her life and her children.
“But if you know that you are on the side of truth, then you should continue fighting,” Kazuo said.
Forgiven, not forgotten
Despite the pain, she stressed that she has already forgiven the men who took her partner from her. “But I don’t think I am ready to heal just yet… To me, everything feels like it all just happened yesterday,” she said.
“For my son Jaypee, I want him to inherit my husband’s great way with dealing with people,” she told the Inquirer, adding: “But more than anything, I want him to grow up to be a good person.”