Flashback: 1996 youth killers
Thirty years ago, in 1996, I wrote a two-part feature story in this paper on the murder of 14-year-old Oliver Ang, an only child and a scholar at the Philippine Science High School, committed in broad daylight by Teddy Bernardo, 20, and Cesar Rivera, 16.
The two killers should be middle-aged men by now. Where are they, how are they? Is there a way I can find them? I had interviewed them while they were in jail, I waded through the squalor in the San Roque slums in Quezon City to find their mothers. And what about the Angs? I cannot begin to imagine how their life has been after the loss of a bright and promising only child.
(The 30-year-old case flashed in my mind because of the gun attack last Monday on the San Jose National High School in Tacloban City, carried out by two students, 16 and 14 years old. They killed three and injured more than a dozen students. Many details about the crime are known by now.)
Briefly: Oliver was paying for his food order at Wendy’s in SM North when Teddy and Cesar spotted him.
“We were outside watching him through the glass panel,” one of them told me. After Oliver stepped out, Teddy and Cesar walked close to him. Cesar put his arm around Oliver’s shoulders. They had bladed weapons sharp enough for Oliver to feel them. The three barely spoke, and no one seemed to notice what was going on.
The three crossed Edsa and walked toward the old Paramount Theater. Just to make a long story short, that area was where the two forced Oliver to hand over his money. One of them had an ice pick, the other a beinte nueve (a size 39 fan knife). I do not want to repeat the details of the stabbing here, or how they described what they did. I do not want to picture the scene in my mind.
Oliver was left bleeding on the pavement and died right there. The two confessed killers said they threw their weapons into a canal, split the money, and went their separate ways. Cesar told me, “I later learned that he had six stab wounds.”
It was murder at high noon. It took the police only two days to find Teddy and Cesar, who tearfully confessed to the crime on live TV. That was in 1996, when the “no names, no photos” policy on minor offenders was not yet in place.
On Wednesday, the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP) issued a long statement related to the Tacloban school tragedy titled “Violence in Schools as a Reflection of a Wider Social Crisis.” The lead paragraph summarizes it:
“Incidents of student violence, including shootings, stabbings, and other acts that result in the death of learners, are issues beyond the tragedy. Research across criminology, psychology, public health, and education shows that youth violence is rarely caused by a single factor. It develops through a complex interaction of family experiences, exposure to violence, peer influence, digital environments, emotional struggles, social conditions, and the quality of formation young people receive from homes, schools, and communities. Therefore, the response must now move beyond fear and punishment toward prevention, formation, accountability, and the restoration of human relationships.”
It suggests broad awareness and multipronged approaches:
• Poverty, inequality, and the social roots of violence.
• Investment in education: Schools as spaces of protection and hope.
• Holistic formation and curriculum design: Educating the whole person.
• Faculty formation: Teachers as guardians of human development.
• School rules and safety systems: Structure with compassion.
• Nutrition and human development: The connection between body and behavior.
• Role modeling in an open society: The responsibility of adults.
• Rediscovering Filipino values as foundations of peace.
• Access to the world: Preparing young people for a connected age.
• Building a culture that protects life.
The CEAP statement is a set of desiderata that sounds like a utopian checklist from “Lost Horizon,” but it is perhaps the best that can be aimed for. So, why not? It deserves to be studied. Carrying it out on the ground is another story, what with lack of funds, the dearth of persons with expertise, overworked and underpaid teachers, dysfunctional families, lack of role models, overpopulation, and other environmental and societal factors that impinge on the young’s proper formation. But we should not freeze on our tracks.
But if I may digress, think of teachers who face overbearing parents and disrespectful students. I dread the day when teachers—both good and so-so—will be a rarity. I saw a meme on Facebook that says, “Teaching is the only profession where you are expected to care like parents, manage like CEOs, document like lawyers, counsel like therapists, and still get paid less than many of the professionals you help create.”
It’s amazing that no teacher has yet turned murderous the way some of their wards have. I think of that video of a young teacher in a barrio school who, just using her bare hands and feet, went up the tall, iron flagpole to reattach the rope with the national flag, while her pupils watched their Ma’am in amazement, among them a future gun wielder or president of the republic.
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