DoJ affirms homicide rap filed vs Daza kin

Concluding its reinvestigation into the killing of Noel Orate Sr.—the former boyfriend of former Quezon City Rep. Nanette Castelo-Daza—the Department of Justice on Wednesday affirmed the homicide case filed last month by the Quezon City police against Bulacan provincial board member Romeo Allan Robes.

“[E]vidence extant in the records is sufficient to engender a well-founded belief that only homicide was committed. It is respectfully recommended that the information for homicide against respondent Robes be affirmed on reinvestigation,” Assistant State Prosecutor Gino Paolo Santiago said in a resolution, which was approved by Prosecutor General Claro Arellano.

The Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 18 earlier ordered a reinvestigation of Orate’s death based on a motion filed by his family.

Orate was killed by Robes after the former went to Daza’s house in Quezon City on Feb. 10 in a supposed attempt to win her back.

Robes, the former congresswoman’s son-in-law, said he shot the victim in self-defense after the latter took him, his wife and Daza hostage and threatened to kill all of them. He was subsequently charged by the police with homicide.

Shot 5 times

Orate’s family, however, insisted that the charge should be murder since their father was shot five times, indicating that his death was premeditated.

At that time, Daza and Orate, whose marriages to different partners had been annulled, had just ended a 12-year relationship.

On March 1, Justice Secretary Leila de Lima ordered the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to conduct a new probe of Orate’s death. On March 30, the NBI came out with a recommendation for the filing of a murder charge against Robes.

Court records and a report submitted by the NBI on the case were later transmitted to Santiago who was tasked to conduct a reinvestigation of Orate’s death.

According to Santiago, he limited his inquiry to a single issue: Whether there was sufficient ground to engender a well-founded belief that circumstances exist to qualify the killing as a murder.

The prosecutor said that after conducting a “meticulous review” of the case, he was “morally convinced” that only homicide was committed.

Santiago said not all qualifying circumstances specified under the Revised Penal Code were present for the killing to be considered a murder. He pointed out that no evidence was presented to show how the killing commenced, developed and ended as the testimony of the police and Orate family police only narrated the events after the victim’s death.

“There is nothing in the report that would establish that the perpetrator consciously adopted a mode of attack to facilitate the perpetration of the killing without risk to himself which is the essence of treachery, whereas there is a witness testifying that the victim was armed at the time of the incident and narrating circumstances that support self-defense,” he said.

The fact the Orate was shot five times also did not necessarily mean he was murdered, Santiago added, saying that “jurisprudence states that when the assault is continuous, the fact that the final blows were inflicted in a manner consistent with treachery does not qualify the killing [as a] murder unless proven that treachery was also present at the inception of the attack.”

The prosecutor said there was also no evidence to show that Robes deliberately used or took advantage of his superior strength to carry out the killing.