by Estanislao C. Albano Jr.
(posted from the news article he submitted to me for publication at Guru Press)
A team of Tabuk City policemen while still in hot pursuit of the killers of their fellow policemen the day before recovered an abandoned red TMX 155 Honda motorcycle with no plate number at Ipil, Tabuk City, at 4 AM of March 27.
The police believe that the motorcycle which bears engine number KCOIE000096PH and chassis number 91821690 was the getaway vehicle of the men who gunned down SPO1 Joe Angway, 51, married, resident of San Juan, this city, infront of the Tabuk Central School at Dagupan Weste 10:30 AM of March 26.
The motorcycle which nobody as yet has come to claim was found abandoned at a road deadend.
An ambulant vendor whose stall is just a few meters from the spot where Angway was shot told the Guru Press that the two men who she saw running away after the shots which killed Angway boarded a motorcycle waiting at the other crossing. Driven by a third suspect, the motorcycle fled to the east.
The vendor said that the last time she saw Angway alive was some minutes before the incident, and he was lying on his hammock suspended between two trees whittling with a small bolo at a wooden stick. She heard him say that he would make the stick into a cane.
Along with unarmed two police interns and two unarmed police field trainees, Angway was manning that busy U-turn slot of the Provincial Road between and Tabuk Central School and the St. Theresita’s School which was having its closing ceremonies at the time of the crime.
Except for the information on the recovered motorcycle, police investigators declined to go on record with the results of their investigation going only so far as say that they still do not have a firm lead in the case although a lot of angles are being considered.
Angway’s colleagues could not believe that anyone would want to harm the hard-working, humble and affable policeman.
SPOIV Tiburcio Macanas said that they do not know of any crime Angway has committed or enemy he has made.
Indicative of his confidence that there are no people who hate and want to do him harm, it was seldom that Angway did his traffic duties armed. His colleagues said that at times, he would place the gun in his clutch bag and when he reaches his beat, asks one of the ambulant vendors to keep it and that was what he did yesterday. The investigators said that one of the vendors near the crime scene turned over to them the clutch bag containing Angway’s gun, handcuffs and cigarettes.