Rebelyn Pitao: Murder Most Foul

By Keith Bacongco
Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project

DAVAO CITY –- Rebelyn was wearing her white school teacher’s uniform when she left home to go to work. “Ma, I have to go now,” she called out to her mother Evangeline.

It was 6:30 a.m.,the last time Mrs. Pitao saw her 20-year-old daughter. It was the last time she would heard her voice.

A Killing Too Far. Rebelyn Pitao, a grade school teacher, was abducted, tortured, raped, killed and dumped in a watery ditch in Carmen, Davao del Norte. (Photo by Barry Ohaylan)

Rebelyn usually arrived back home by 6:30 p.m. each school day. But last week, Wednesday March 4, there was no sign of her. Mrs. Pitao was worried. An hour and a half later, local police officers and a tricycle driver knocked on her door and brought news that Rebelyn had been abducted by armed gunmen on her way home.

“When I heard she had been taken, I knew I would never see her alive again,” said Mrs. Pitao from her small house in Bago Galera, Toril District in Davao City. “I knew they would kill her because they were angry at her father.”

Rebelyn, who would have turned 21 on March 20, was the third child and daughter of New People’s Army (NPA) leader Leoncio Pitao, also known as Commander Parago. Her partially naked body was found late the following day, Thursday March 5, in an irrigation ditch in a village called San Isidro in Carmen, Davao Del Norte, about 50 kilometers north from here. She had been bound, gagged, raped and repeatedly stabbed in the chest.

“There were rope markings around her neck and mud all over her body,” her mother told the Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project.

According to the Scene of the Crime Operatives (SOCO) of the Davao City police, Rebelyn had been dead for more than 20 hours before she was found by a local farmer. It suggests she was killed very soon after being taken.

“Her body bore five wounds inflicted by a thin sharp object such as an ice pick, which pierced her lungs and liver,” according to Dr. Tomas Dimaandal who conducted the autopsy at a local funeral home. His report added that her genitals had suffered cuts “possibly caused by a hard object.” Her mouth had been taped up.

Mrs. Pitao explained how, with the police officers listening, tricycle driver Danny Peliciano told her that two unknown men had boarded his vehicle alongside Rebelyn when she climbed in to ride home. As they neared Bago Gallera de Oro subdivision a white van, a Toyota Revo, blocked their path and forced the tricycle to stop.

“Two other men came out of the van and dragged her out of the tricycle. The driver said Rebelyn was screaming for help but he could not do anything because the men were armed. The driver said he ran away. Then they dragged my daughter inside the van,” she said.

Mrs. Pitao believes the other two men on the tricycle were accomplices and all four men climbed in the van.

The abduction site is about 300 meters from the national highway and is beside a church with the nearest house 50 meters away.

Dumped. A makeshift cross now stands at the irrigation ditch in Carmen, Davao del Norte, where Rebelyn’s body was found a day after she was snatched in Davao City. (Photo by Keith Bacongco/AKP Images)

Peliciano is now missing. A fellow driver who did not wish to be named said that right after the incident he quit working his usual route and disappeared. “He is no longer staying at home and we have no idea where he is now. I think he went into hiding because he is a witness,” said the man.

Mrs. Pitao believes her daughter may have been attacked inside the van or taken to a place in nearby Panabo City or Carmen where she was tied up, tortured and killed soon after and then taken to the ditch after dark.

It is believed she was dumped there between midnight and 1 a.m.

According to a police report obtained by the Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project from the Carmen police station, Rebelyn’s body was discovered by rice farmer Raffy Agres whose signed affidavit says he found her lying in the flooded ditch at around 5 p.m. that Thursday.

“You could hardly see the body even when you were just beside the canal because of the grass here and the ridge,” said banana plantation worker Noel Lanoy who was with Agres when Rebelyn was found.

“He screamed out that a body had been dumped and it was a summary killing,” said Lanoy. “I first thought it was a banana tree trunk.”

Egles Brieta whose house lies about 100 meters away from the scene, says she didn’t see or hear any vehicle that would have been needed to dump Rebelyn’s body. “It is so quiet here, yet we didn’t hear anything or anybody.

A makeshift bamboo cross now stands in the knee-deep water where Rebelyn was found. According to Brieta, the bodies of two men were also found dumped here in 2004.