Romwell

In the years I’ve spent researching the stories of the victims of the drug war, I’ve seen how, for every killing that hit the news headlines, hundreds, even thousands, were unnoted—stories of lives that ended in abrupt violence that never made their mark in the public consciousness, with only their loved ones to remember them and bear the weight of their loss.

I wouldn’t have known about Romwell if his mother wasn’t introduced to me by another woman who lost members of her family to the drug war. I looked up his name online and couldn’t find a single mention of it in any news articles. If it hadn’t been for his mother, his death would have been buried under thousands of other deaths.

When Rodrigo Duterte unleashed the drug war on the country, one of its first targets was the city of Caloocan, a densely populated area with the highest poverty incidence rate in Metro Manila at the time. Where there’s poverty, there’s despair. Despair is tenacious. Despair drives people to do anything to survive. Caloocan was a hive of petty thieves and drug dealers, and in their midst, those who turned to drugs to endure the daily grind of backbreaking work or to escape from the physical and mental cruelties inflicted on them by the world.

When Operation Tokhang took effect, neighbourhoods in Caloocan would be frequently raided to the point where, at the sight of cops arriving, people would drop what they were doing and flee towards the safety of their own homes. They had learned that the cops would grab people randomly, even those who just happened to be hanging out in front of their homes.

By the 23rd of October, 2016, three people on Romwell’s street alone had already been killed in these raids. He had no idea he would be next.

He was out with his girlfriend, having breakfast at 6 A.M.—a time one would think would be safe from the monsters who often attacked at night. When they noticed people scampering into buildings and houses, they knew to run straight away, too. It could only mean that the cops had arrived. For some reason, however, the cops followed the couple as they ran into the girl's house.

The cops had found a target for that morning, and it was the skinny, boyish young man who was only trying to have breakfast outdoors. They ordered his girlfriend and her family out of the house, then proceeded to interrogate and torment Romwell, poking him repeatedly in the stomach with their guns.

They shot him three times in the stomach, and then kicked him through the doorway, which fractured his shoulder. As he lay dying, scared, alone, he kept calling to the two women who considered him most precious—his mother and grandmother. But they couldn’t hear him because they were at home, on a street that ran parallel to where Romwell met his death.

They then put a small sachet of meth and a gun on his body.

A neighbour would tell Angel, his mother, of what happened. By the time she arrived, the house had been fenced off by scene of the crime operative (SOCO) agents. They told her to go to the funeral parlour where Romwell’s body had already been taken.

Romwell’s family wanted to fight for him, to clear his name and make the cops who killed him pay for their crime. They had Romwell’s body autopsied. The autopsy report not only recorded his injuries but also named the three cops who shot him.

Angel asked the Department of Justice for help but was told that they didn’t handle cases like this. They didn’t tell her either where she should go instead. She kept phoning them and then they stopped taking her calls.

Angel doesn’t believe she will ever find justice for Romwell in the Philippines. But she’s hopeful that the man ultimately responsible for Romwell's death will eventually be convicted for his crimes.

‘We’re leaving it all up to God,’ she says.

Romwell was 19.

Source:

Interview with Angel, Romwell's mum