An appeal to Erwin Tulfo

In today’s flexible world, even journalists may shift midstream and enter related fields like public relations and broadcasting– unlike in the past when they all smelled of ink up to their last breath.

However, there are still a lot of print journalists who remain true to their original calling up to the very end. One of them was Carmelina "Lina" Monroy of the newspaper Malaya.

It was in that newspaper where I had the chance to work with Lina. I remember it was a month after EDSA I and the late revered freedom fighter Joe Burgos had just thrust into my lap the position of entertainment/features editor. It was a job I never applied for and I learned about my appointment only when it was published in the newspaper. Of course, I accepted the job, albeit reluctantly. (It was a lot of work that tied me down to my desk.)

On my first day on the job, Lina and two other people also came in and were assigned to the desk to go after grammatical lapses or sometimes even rewrite stories of beat reporters. (Prior to that, Lina was with the Philippine News Agency – if I’m not mistaken.)

Eventually, Lina was made to collate and put together the provincial page. Since her desk was right behind mine, we really had no choice but to like each other. This wasn’t difficult from my end since she was a very amiable person with no mean bone in her body. Maybe it also helped that she, being much older, was very patient with me and merely tolerated my generally bratty behavior.

Malaya that time still had its office in West Avenue and come break time we’d walk to this Chinese restaurant called Ha Yuan (very near the gate of Philamlife Homes) and eat dimsum and congee.

Since she was a whiz in the kitchen, she also shared with me recipes (which I would automatically pass on to the cook) she herself had picked up from cookbooks. (The only two recipes from her that I was able to do by myself in the kitchen were her lemon butter sauce –which any idiot like me can do – and chicken in orange gravy.)

Although we weren’t exactly best friends, Lina Monroy and I got along famously well that at one point, I started calling her Mommy. But most of the time, I was calling her Marilyn Monroy. (For a while, I even called her Carmelina – after our favorite caramelized popcorn.)

After I left Malaya, Lina and I still managed to keep track of each other. But eventually, we lost touch. I knew she was still with Malaya and had been reassigned foreign news editor.

Then, Wednesday last week, Maridol Bismark (who inherited my position in Malaya) relayed to me the tragic news that Lina Monroy had died the night before. How? Was she ill?

It turned out that Lina, a resident of Quiapo for the longest time, had moved to Lagro in Quezon City. On her way home at around 7 p.m., she was crossing Commonwealth Avenue and was hit by a passenger bus. (She usually took the overpass, except that her knees were supposedly bothering her that time.)

According to the police report, Lina was first sideswiped by the bus and was eventually run over by the vehicle’s right rear tire. She was dead on arrival at the Fairview General Hospital. She was 55. Three days earlier, she had gotten married in quiet ceremonies to her longtime boyfriend, Vic.

Lina, fresh from a vacation leave, had just resumed regular work.

She lay in state only for a night (at the Prime Funeral Homes) and her remains were cremated right the following day.

I don’t mean to throw an accusing finger at the bus driver (in fact, I’m not even giving the name of the bus that killed Lina), but during the wake, there were the usual talks about how some bus companies – as a standard operating procedure – allegedly instruct their drivers that in cases of accidents, they should see to it that the victims are dead because (and this is horrifying) that would be cheaper (life in this country is cheap) compared to having the victim hospitalized.

I’m not saying that the bus driver who sideswiped Lina Monroy deliberately finished her off, but this is the theory playing in the minds of family and friends. And you can’t blame them. After all, talks about this cruel bus company policy (if it’s true) had been going around for quite sometime.

Actually, I make it a point to monitor our public service programs on TV–Emergency, Private I and Imbestigador – but so far, I don’t think any of these shows has tackled this issue. If they did, I’m sorry I missed it.

But at any rate, I think it’s worth looking into once more. And I appeal particularly to Erwin Tulfo because he too was part of the newspaper Malaya where he started out as a young reporter. I’m not just sure, however, if he had the chance to work with Lina Monroy.

But even if he never knew Lina, maybe it won’t be a bad idea at all if he worked on this story for his Private I show on ABS-CBN. We, his former Malaya co-staffers, want nothing else at this point but to see Lina’s death get some justice.