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.