Angry pa kills partner, stabs self

Two young sons witness domestic violence in Lahug on the eve of  Father’s Day

A man yesterday bludgeoned to death his wife with a hammer before taking his own life with a kitchen knife in barangay Lahug, Cebu City.

The couple had a heated argument whose violent end was witnessed by their 11-year-old son a day  before the world celebrated Father’s Day.

Police said the father  Jerome Sr. , 37,  had a history of drug use and was jobless, leaving his live-in partner Josephine Pausal, 37,  to be the family’s breadwinner.

The woman had just come home  from Carbon Market where she bought  vegetables and other ingredients for her small food business when the couple started to argue.

Their son  Jerome Jr. said   his parents would often fight about his  father’s jealous fits and his mother’s nagging.

He said that his father tried to stab his  2-year-old brother just before  he killed himself.

“I was sleeping.  When I woke up, I saw my father strike my mother’s head with a hammer,” he said in Cebuano.

The  father grabbed the hand of his little brother and tried to stab the boy but the younger Jerome said he  struck their father with a   piece of wood and told his sibling to run.

The elder boy called out for help to his grandmother, Maria Ana, who lives nearby.

Before she could arrive, the father  Jerome Sr. had already stabbed himself to death.

The eldest child, Joseph, was not around as he left early to play computer games in a nearby Internet café.

The grandmother, Maria Ana, 63,  said she was awakened by the child’s pleas for help.

She entered the house and found the bludgeoned woman    sitting beside a cabinet with her head and face covered in blood while Jerome Sr. was seated  next to her as if embracing  his partner.

Maria Ana confirmed that  her son Jerome Sr. was a former drug dependent.

She said she had earlier  cautioned Pausal to stop  nagging Jerome Sr. to avoid triggering a situation where he may harm her considering that he was a recovering drug user.

Maria Ana said she had urged her son to get a job so that he and Pausal would  stop fighting over money problems.

At one time, her son once confided that he felt  humiliated whenever  Pausal would call him   good for nothing and unable to  provide for his family.

The woman used to work as  a contractual employee of a mall before she was laid off.   To make ends meet, she sold food packs to her former colleagues in the mall.

Jerome Sr.’s older brother offered him a job in a construction site in Sorsogon but he refused saying he would  not leave his family.

His 11-year-old son  recalled seeing his father sniffing shabu in 2013 and beating up his younger brother.