Missing girl found buried in Navotas cemetery

A 14-year-old girl, who was reported missing last month, was found buried in a public cemetery in the coastal town of Navotas on Saturday.

The girl’s mother, Rosalina Estudillo, 50, a resident of Barangay San Jose, Navotas, told the police that her daughter failed to return home since June 16.

At around 5 p.m. on Saturday, residents living near the Barangay San Jose public cemetery complained of foul odor coming from the graveyard.

The local police and barangay leaders discovered the girl’s decomposing body almost halfburied in a vacant lot inside the cemetery. The corpse was half naked.

Estudillo identified the body as that of her missing daughter through the clothes and shoe found scattered near the makeshift grave.

Initial examinations by the police showed that the victim could have been sexually abused and her head bashed with a hard object causing her instant death.

Estudillo said that her daughter, the fifth among her six children, works as a singer in a videoke bar to augment her income as a laundry woman.

The victim was an out-of-school youth.

The mother said that her daughter was last seen at the videoke bar at around 12 midnight on June 16 with a certain Joel Cortan, 30, a worker at the Navotas fish port complex. Cortan, however, was also reported missing.

Estudillo told the police that somebody living at the cemetery witnessed how her daughter was killed the night she failed to return home and could identify the culprit. The victim’s family yesterday called on concerned government agencies to help them find the suspect and get justice for the girl’s grisly murder.