The girl, aged two, was taken yesterday to the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center in Cebu City with badly swollen lips and bruises on her body. At least three doctors at the hospital – Kerwin Yap, Simon Flores and Jean Zeta, signed a medical report that the girl exhibited "definitive signs of physical abuse."
Police in Lapulapu City arrested Roldan Patalinjug, 30, based on complaints from his neighbors in Mangubat Street who noticed the injuries suffered by the child. The alleged beating was believed to have happened at about midnight of Saturday. Patalinjug, interviewed in his jail cell, denied physically abusing the child but admitted giving her a fillip on the lips and lightly spanking and pinching her on the belly when she refused to stop crying after falling from a bamboo bench where she had been sleeping. Patalinjug attributed the swollen lips on the child as the result of her fall.
The girl was left in the care of Patalinjug by his former girlfriend, Liza Gocela, with whom he had lived for two years prior to their breakup only last month.
The girl is the daughter of Gocela’s best friend and was in turn left in her care as the real mother was in Manila preparing to leave for a job in Japan.
Gocela, who works at a shellcraft factory, has been living with friends in Urgello Street in Cebu City since her breakup with Patalinjug, with whom she, nevertheless still maintains cordial relations.
Last Thursday, Gocela gave in to Patalinjug’s request to leave the girl with him for a few days, claiming he had missed the child, who had been in his and Gocela’s care while they were still together since she was six months.
Gocela said that on Saturday night, Patalinjug called her up five times begging that they get back together but she refused each time, telling him he was drunk. She did promise to talk to him when she would come to pick up the child on Sunday, hoping by then he would be sober.
On Sunday, Gocela’s mother, who had just come from her native Baybay in Leyte, called her to report about the alleged abuse. – Freeman News Service