We condole with the family, friends, and colleagues of SPO1 Roderick Balili, who died Friday night after — according to Central Visayas police — accidentally shooting himself twice in the chest.
We likewise extend our condolences to those who mourn the passing of senior anti-drug agent Von Rian Tecson who was ambushed in Carcar City Friday.
The least law enforcers can do at this time, apart from standing in solidarity with the ones left behind by their dead comrades-in-arms is to be truthful.
Unfortunately, the yarn being spun by the police about Balili’s final moments to try to establish his innocence in Tecson’s liquidation is littered with telltale gaps found in tall tales.
In the grapevine where talk flew fast and furious that Balili liquidated Tecson, police superiors sowed information that Balili was in stable condition.
The truth was that he lay dying in a hospital.
Central Visayas Police Director Debold Sinas said Balili could not have been involved in Tecson’s ambush since he was in Pinamungajan town where he had, amid surveillance work, accidentally shot himself in the chest.
Here is where the fishy turns pungent.
Pinamungajan Police Chief Alfredo Kuhay Jr. said a concerned caller reported to him the occurrence of a shooting in town.
However, his subordinates did not verify the report, Kuhay said, because the caller did not state a location. Hence, there is no blotter record of Balili’s lethal misfiring.
Are Pinamungajan police so inept they do not actively seek alternative information sources on a reported shooting alarm?
Do they just sit back and refuse to find out where a shooting transpired in spite of the threat to public safety?
Supt. Reyman Tolentin, regional police spokesman, said Balili was accidentally shot when the gun being handed to him by the policeman driving their vehicle went off as they passed a hump on the road.
Are our cops’ safety protocols so poor they can accidentally fire guns just like that? Who is the policeman who drove the vehicle? Why is he unnamed? Should he not be relieved pending inquiry into negligence?
Who are we to believe? Debold who said Balili shot himself or Tolentin who said the driver shot Balili?
To explain how Balili sustained two gunshots, Tolentin said Balili’s firearm “was [a] Glock 9mm, an automatic pistol which can fire multiple shots [with] just one click of the trigger especially when it is loaded.”
Contrary to Tolentin’s statement, the said gun is not automatic but semi-automatic. This means only one cartridge is fired each time the trigger is pulled.
Tolentin has also speculated that the Glock may have been fitted with a device to render it automatic, but this is speculation.
Authorities said Tecson’s driver described his assassin as a man of small build, thereby clearing Balili of involvement in Tecson’s.
But the driver had already noted earlier that he could not recognize the faces of Tecson’s four assailants.
If policemen are involved in killing anti-narcotics agents or otherwise regularly moonlight as hitmen in the crackdown on illegal drugs, further evidence will not only change the statistics, not the fact.
Police have much more to gain in being honest than in engaging in panic-stricken impression management or in an ill-disguised cover-up that may well make them no worse than the hoodlums in their ranks.
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