2 cases of slain Manila kids decided Wednesday

The Manila Regional Trial Court Branch 5 is expected to issue a decision Wednesday on two gruesome crimes involving a 5-year-old girl and her nanny who died of suffocation in 2000 and a 7-year-old girl who was found stuffed inside a suitcase in 2007.

Twelve years after the death of 5-year-old Eunice Kaye Chuang, her mother Emily still gets teary eyed at the mention of her daughter. “I’m anxious for three days now since they called me that there will be a decision,” Chuang said on Monday.

The promulgation of the decision at the sala of Judge Jansen Rodriguez was originally scheduled on Monday but was moved to Wednesday.

Chuang and her babysitter, Jovita Montecino, went missing on Oct. 17, 2000, after a taxi driver fetched them from Philippine San Bin School in Binondo, Manila, where Eunice was a kindergarten pupil.

Emily recalled that she received a phone call at 6 a.m. the following day but only heard a girl crying on the other end of the line. She later saw Eunice at 7:30 p.m. at the police crime laboratory, already dead for seven hours.

The taxi driver, Monico Santos, and his cousin Francis Canoza were arrested after the Bulacan police and members of the then Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force discovered the bodies in the ceiling of Santos’ house in Villa Tierra Subdivision in Malolos, Bulacan. They were charged with kidnapping with double homicide.

Police said Chuang and Montecino died from suffocation after they were hogtied, gagged and forced into the ceiling while their captors were demanding ransom. An autopsy revealed that Montecino was also raped.

The other case up for decision involved 7-year-old Geraldine “Dindin” Palma, whose half-naked body was found inside a luggage bag floating on Manila Bay at North Harbor in Tondo in August 2007. An autopsy showed that the child was raped and strangled with a cord.

A DNA test had to be conducted by the National Bureau of Investigation to prove that the bloated, decomposing body was indeed Palma’s. This was after doubts were raised about the body’s identity because another girl went missing at the time, and the body didn’t match the descriptions earlier given about Palma, particularly concerning her height.

Four men—Henry Redoblado, Joey Nodalo, Renato Bohol and Ramil Diorico—were tried for rape with homicide for the Palma case. Nodalo and Bohol were also charged with kidnapping for ransom.