Drunk a victim of ‘Tokhang?’

Anthony Ocdin got loud whenever he was drunk. On March 1, he was finally silenced, but only after someone wrapped his head in packaging tape, strangled him, removed his fingernails and shot him in the head.

A police report said that a sachet of “shabu” (methamphetamine hydrochloride) was found in his pocket but his family denied that he was into drugs.

He drank to stop the pain in his head after he got into a fight last year and was struck with a piece of wood, his mother Cristina told the Inquirer. Her 31-year-old son was never right in the head afterward, she added.

Ocdin would usually wake up about 7 a.m. and have cheap brandy for breakfast. On March 1, he had a few glasses before rousing the whole neighborhood in Barangay NBBS, Navotas City, with screams.

To pacify him, his neighbors took him to the barangay hall. Since Cristina, a factory worker, was then at work, she couldn’t go to him.

“Let him sleep here,” the neighbors reportedly told barangay officials, according to Ocdin’s younger brother Mike.

Mike said that when he checked on his brother in the afternoon, he was told that they had turned Ocdin over to the Navotas police.

At the police station, officers said his brother had not been taken there. The following day, Mike, Cristina and her mother Virginia Genese went back to the barangay hall to ask where Ocdin was.

“The official there just mocked me and said: ‘Maybe he’s inside your pocket,’” a weeping Cristina said.

“How can they say that? If a pet goes missing, you look for it. How much more if it’s your son?” she added.

Fearing the worst, Cristina and Virginia went to funeral homes but came up empty.
They went to the Navotas police where a homicide investigator showed them the photo of a dead man who was dumped on Chungkang Street on March 2.

“That’s my son, sir,” Cristina said before she lapsed into a weeping fit. She was reunited with her son the following day at Ezekiel Funeral Homes.

“You know, I’m scared of dead bodies. I don’t even look at them. I didn’t know that the first time I would touch a dead body, it would be my son’s,” she said.

There was a gunshot wound on Ocdin’s temple and strangulation marks on his neck. His fingers were clenched into fists. There were no fingernails on his right hand while his right leg was broken.

Cristina and Virginia couldn’t understand the cruelty of his killers.
“They tortured him. But why? He was a good person,” Cristina said, adding: “The day they found him, my son’s head was wrapped in plastic and packaging tape. Why ma’am, why?”

Before she laid him to rest on Sunday, she packed his bag with his favorite clothes, cap, blanket and towel. It took so long for him to be buried because they had to ask for donations to raise the necessary amount for his funeral.

“I know he’s dead but I would like to believe he’s still alive. I’d like to imagine that he’d come back someday,” Cristina said.