It had been said that a person can respond to personal tragedy in at least three ways; one, he or she will be scarred emotionally and psychologically to the point of incapacity, two he/she may lash out and exact vengeance against either her tormentors or victimize others like him/her and three, he/she may overcome the damage wrought on him/her and use the trauma to do good and help others similarly damaged and traumatized to heal as well.
Sadly the second scenario happened to Liezyl Margallo, alias Shannon Carpio who faced 16 arrest warrants in Cagayan de Oro City for the rape, torture and murder of children who were used in gruesome sex videos that were sold online.
In trying to justify or excuse her maltreatment of the children, Liezyl or Shannon said she was physically abused as a child by her parents and thought that she can share or teach other children about what she went through.
What she hoped to achieve by doing that we don’t know but we do know that she and her Australian cohort, a detained predator named Peter Gerard Scully who was arrested by agents of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) two years ago in Bukidnon province, had benefited financially from the blood and online humiliation of the children who were picked up from the streets and
orphanages.
Liezyl was described by one of the arresting officers as a “savage girl” and she lived up to that description by partaking of the physical and sexual abuse of the underage girls.
Based on her features, it would be hard even to imagine if she derived anything from inflicting harm on the children. Maybe the bottomline was she wanted to earn money and lots of it and the real predator wasn’t her but Scully who used her to get to the indigent children.
And she did it well based on how many years and the number of victims that she managed to fool into believing that she will take care of them. She even fooled some people into taking her into their confidence and social circle, never realizing that beneath her simple disposition lay a young woman depraved enough to abuse children for profit.
What makes her story even more disturbing was that she is only part of a large network of predators out to victimize children whose parents were either too poor or too lost in their own problems to care for them.
Perhaps there is still hope for Liezyl to reform but she can help by telling law enforcement agencies and local governments anything and everything she knows about this presumably international syndicate of predators.
The Cebu Archdiocese said it will discuss human trafficking during the ongoing Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) and it’s high time they do more than just preach by intensifying their efforts to reach out and help these children and their parents.