His family and friends may believe and proclaim his innocence, but there’s no turning back the clock for Niño Rodel Taboada who died at the hands of agents of the regional Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) in a house owned by a relative in Barangay Duljo-Fatima, Cebu City last Thursday.
Regardless of the testaments to Taboada’s good character by his father and former co-workers at a call center firm as well as records that showed he passed a criminology licensure exam to become a police officer, PDEA Regional Director Yogi Filemon Ruiz insisted that Taboada sold shabu to his operative.
Both sides insisting on the innocence or guilt of Taboada should produce more than just statements to prove their contention but regardless of his innocence or guilt, PDEA agents had every opportunity to stop and arrest him, not take him out permanently.
Again, we go back to the circumstances that led to Taboada’s death. Based on Ruiz’s account, the PDEA agents were supposedly “forced to kill” Taboada after he engaged them in a shootout inside the house of a relative.
Taboada’s friend believed the PDEA may have been targeting his relative, believed to be Kendall Taboada who was arrested during last Thursday’s operation and had shot Taboada by mistake.
But still the PDEA agents may not have bothered differentiating between Kendall and Niño Rodel. It’s also unclear if the agents had good reason to take out Taboada considering they had the advantage in numbers and firepower to effect an arrest and not as Taboada’s family and friends claim is an execution.
Maybe the PDEA agents would reason that since Duljo-Fatima is a hotbed for illegal drugs, that Taboada may have cohorts in the area just waiting to ambush them even if the agents had already rounded up most of the suspects earlier.
Taboada’s death in no way proves his guilt nor innocence of the charges leveled at him by the PDEA which is obligated under law to produce evidence to prove the suspect’s culpability beyond reasonable doubt.
As it is, President Rodrigo Duterte’s marching orders to kill drug suspects who resist arrest had been taken literally by the police and other law enforcement agencies to mean that the suspects should be executed rather than arrested since it entails so much effort to investigate and put them away behind bars, where it had been shown lately that they can still continue to operate and earn millions in profits from the illegal drug trade.
Who knows if Niño Rodel Taboada is guilty or innocent of the charges against him – he is but one in a growing list of casualties in the war on illegal drugs who was denied the chance to clear his name even if it had yet to be proven that he posed a serious enough threat to the safety of the PDEA operatives that they had no choice but to shoot him.