The CloseUp Forever Summer concert was a much-awaited annual music festival that brought to the Philippines big international acts pumping up the crowd during a night of youthful revelry.
During the 2016 edition of the concert, five people collapsed minutes apart at different areas of the venue.
Hours after they were taken to the hospital, they died of heart attack and multiorgan damage allegedly due to party drug overdose.
Autopsies and tests on four of the five fatalities showed drug traces in their bodies, such as synthetic cathinones and MDMA methylene homolog, a cheaper but more lethal form of the party drug ecstasy.
The police identified the fatalities as Ariel Leal, 22; Lance Garcia, 36; Bianca Fontejon, 18; Ken Migawa, 18; and American national Eric Anthony Miller, 33.
The concert, held on May 21 that year at the SM Mall of Asia grounds, featured the best of the best in electro dance music.
A week later on May 28, Joel Tovera, the chief of the NBI Anti-Illegal Drugs Division at the time, announced the arrest of Joshua Habalo, one of the alleged suppliers of the drugs sold at the event.
On May 31, five people were arrested in Parañaque City for alleged manufacture and sale of illegal drugs.
The suspects—Marc David Deen, 28; Martin Dimacali, 21; Tommy Halili, 28; Seergeoh Villanueva, 30; and Erika Dianne Valbuena, 26—were also present at the May 21 concert.
The NBI investigated whether all of them sold drugs at the concert following an information from a politician, whose name was withheld.
According to Tovera, the politician’s son bought drugs from Dimacali without getting the latter’s name first but managed to take a photo of the alleged peddler during the party.
The father then showed the photo to the NBI.
Another informant told Tovera’s team that a group of “yuppies” were manufacturing and peddling synthetic drugs and that they were staying at a unit in the classy Azure Urban Resort Residences in Parañaque City.
On June 1, Ryan Cruz Marquez, suspected of selling ecstasy pills to one of the attendees of the concert, was arrested in Caloocan City following a tip from a woman who was present at the event.
He allegedly sold three ecstasy pills worth P4,500 to an undercover agent during the joint operation of the Pasay and Caloocan police and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency.
On the same month, the families of the victims filed a complaint in the NBI and said they would be filing a class suit against “everybody” liable for the deaths.—INQUIRER RESEARCH SOURCE: INQUIRER ARCHIVES