Felma Cabataña, 30, waits outside the Cebu Provincial Prosecutor’s Office during the filing of a parricide charge against her on January 3, 2019. (Rosalie Abatayo)
Cebu City, Philippines – The autopsy conducted on the six-year-old boy from San Remigio town, northern Cebu, confirmed that the child died from severe beating, the police said.
SPO3 Joe Johnnesky Ynot, the case investigator, said the autopsy was conducted by personnel of the Philippine National Police Regional Crime Laboratory around 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, January 7.
The autopsy found, Ynot said, that Kent Joseph del Rosario, who died on December 30, 2018 after he was allegedly beaten by his mother, succumbed to traumatic injuries to the head.
Ynot said although the full autopsy report has yet to be released, the doctor who facilitated the autopsy already issued a death certificate identifying the child’s bruises, particularly in the head, as the cause of death.
Parricide charges have already been filed against the child’s mother, 30-year-old Felma Cabataña, before the Cebu Provincial Prosecutor’s Office on January 3.
Ynot said the findings of the autopsy has strengthened the case against Cabataña.
Cabataña was arrested on January 1 after personnel of a funeral parlor where the boy was to be embalmed reported to the police station that they had a dead child with several bruises in the body.
Cabataña admitted to having hit her son, who refused to take medicine for his fever, sometime on December 27, 2018 or three days before he died on December 30, 2018.
Cabataña said she only wanted to make her son take the medicine because she was worried about the child’s health.
But Ynot said that during their follow up investigation in Barangay Maño, where the child lived, it was revealed that Cabataña habitually beat the boy, her eldest child from her first marriage.
The boy’s father, Glenn del Rosario, said he is determined to pursue the charges against his former common law wife, especially after the outcome of the autopsy. /bjo