While disappointed over the court ruling sentencing his adopted son Joavan to 36 years in prison, former Talisay City mayor and now Councilor Socrates Fernandez appealed to the public not to judge his son.
“Let us not condemn Joavan. He has already been convicted, and people want to worsen his misery by accusing him of more wrongdoings. They revile him, thinking that he’s a bad person. But who knows he has already changed his ways,” he said in an interview with Cebu Daily News.
Then again, with him in jail for sometime and under the radar the public may have already forgotten Joavan’s past misdeeds to the point that they consider him irrelevant, defanged, so to speak, with no way to spring himself out of prison without scandalizing his adoptive father.
Cebu City Regional Trial Court Judge Ester Veloso found Joavan and five of his friends guilty of abducting and mauling in 2008 two vulcanizing shop workers whom he suspected of stealing the spare tire of his father’s car.
Even before that, the mayor’s adopted son had shown that he was anything but a paragon of virtue. Joavan had even rammed one of the vehicles of pursuing police officers when he tried to elude them.
When he heard about his conviction in court, Joavan blamed it on local politics. He must have been dreaming because his adoptive father had become something of a burden, an albatross tied around the neck of former congressman Eduardo Gullas, Fernandez’s political benefactor.
Even while in jail, Joavan was anything but abandoned. But he was no longer the all-powerful, imposing son of the former mayor.
Now Joavan knows what it feels like to be staying in jail and waiting on his chance to prove his innocence in court like the rest of the underprivileged inmates who don’t have his enviable status in life.
Like the other rich folks who got jailed for crimes perhaps more heinous than he ever committed, Joavan faces a long wait as his father faces his own legal problems.
Councilor Fernandez is one of several officials in City Hall who was ordered by the Commission on Audit (COA) to refund the P29 million spent for the computers and fertilizers acquired several years ago.
How the father will cope with having his salary deducted — that depends on whether the City Treasurer who is also implicated in the case will enforce Talisay City Mayor Johnny de los Reyes’ order — remains to be seen and Joavan can only pin his hopes on his father being reelected to ensure that he won’t be denied his comforts in jail.
As his father said, Joavan now has plenty of time to ponder over how he ignored his father’s pleas to be good and instead chose to indulge in vices that ultimately ruined his life.
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