The six-year-old witness surfaced yesterday wearing a Batman suit then positively identified four of the six suspects in the brutal slaying of his playmate during a confrontation at the office of Mayor Benhur Abalos.
The girl, a resident of Barangay Hulo in Mandaluyong, was buried at a local cemetery last Sunday.
Medico-legal findings showed she was sodomized by three men, said Tito Enriquez, head of the Mayor’s Action Command (MAC), which played a key role in the arrest of suspects, Merino Pedrosa, 28, Tomas Ortega, 28; Danny Gonzales, 24, and Danilo Ramos, 48, all pedicab drivers and neighbors of the girl.
Another suspect, Leonardo Balala, 53, was also arrested by MAC agents but local police released him for lack of evidence. However, the testimony of the new witness and that of a 12-year-old deaf-mute linked him and another unidentified suspect to the slay. They are now being hunted.
The new witness, accompanied by his father, described to Abalos and Senior Superintendent Sukarno Ikbala, local police chief, how the suspects dragged the girl into a vacant grassy lot in their neighborhood last Sunday.
"He pointed to the suspects and revealed their role in the slaying of the girl. He was straightforward, confident and appeared to have witnessed the entire episode the suspects committed their evil deed," Enriquez told The STAR.
Pedrosa, who claimed to have found the dead girl, turned out to be one of the suspects. Enriquez said they recovered Pedrosa’s sunglasses and wallet near the creek along San Francisco Drive, where the body was found.
According to Enriquez, the witness saw the suspects hitting the girl with their fists below the ear. She kept fighting them, which explains why two of the suspects sustained scratches, the MAC chief said.
The boy ran to report the incident to his mother, who ignored him at first, Enriquez said.
When the girl was buried, the family of the witness decided to keep the incident to themselves for fear that the suspects would get back at them. However, when the girl started appearing in the boy’s dreams, the father relented and brought him to the police.
Abalos expressed confidence that with the testimony and that of other witnesses, they can get a conviction against the suspects, who have been charged with rape and homicide before the city’s prosecutor’s office.