Is it truly the end of the road insofar as the search for justice of the parents of slain six-year-old Ellah Joy Pique is concerned?
“Under the Rules (of Court), only a judgment of a conviction can be subjected to a motion for reconsideration or an appeal,” Cebu Provincial Prosecutor Pepita Jane Petralba said in a a text message to Cebu Daily News hours after Regional Trial Court Judge Ester Veloso acquitted Bella Ruby Santos of murder charges in relation to Ellah Joy’s death.
While Santos’s family can now find a good reason to celebrate the coming holidays, it won’t be a good Christmas nor New Year for the Pique family, whose patriarch Renante Pique had to quit his job due to the emotional and financial costs his daughter’s murder case brought on him, his wife and children.
He and his family can always defiantly say that they won’t give up on their search for justice to Ellah Joy’s death and even relegate punishment to those who killed their daughter to divine justice but one cannot perhaps fully appreciate the anguish and despair they’ve felt on seeing the court letting Santos walk due to what it saw as insufficient evidence.
The Ellah Joy murder case proved to be too much for even the combined efforts of the Children’s Legal Bureau, the lawyers provided by the Cebu provincial government and the Cebu provincial police office to successfully prosecute.
The first time they dropped the ball was in identifying Cebuana nurse and her Norwegian boyfriend Sven Berger as the perpetrators and it was only after the couple produced security camera footage proving that they were in a hotel at the time the kidnapping and murder of Ellah Joy took place that they were let go.
By the time they arrested Santos, things looked promising even if she did manage to lead the police on a merry chase before being arrested anew and jailed for trial.
When it all boiled down to the essentials of the case—the reliability of the child witnesses, the material evidence such as the Pajeros supposedly used by Santos and so on—the prosecution failed to convince the court that it had a solid case against her and her British boyfriend Ian Charles Griffiths, whose house arrest may well be over due to the court ruling.
Whether or not it’s over, the Ellah Joy case is a sober reminder on the inadequacies of the police’s forensic skills which would have proved valuable in producing evidence and identifying whoever killed the six-year-old girl whose remains were found dumped off a cliff in Barili town, southwest Cebu five years ago.
As it is, the Pique family can only rely on their faith in God and his divine justice to sustain them in the depths of their despair.
We join the public in hoping and praying that they be served justice sooner rather than later.
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