Cavite vendor wanted cash for baby’s milk

MANILA, Philippines - For the second day yesterday, 20-year-old Al Orio set out from his home on Bagbag Street in Rosario, Cavite, to sell taho (soybean jelly) and earn some money to buy milk for his two-month-old daughter.

Seeing him burdened with the heavy taho container, his brother Antonio, 16, decided to help him.

Hours later, the elder Orio lay dead and his brother was fighting for his life at the Philippine General Hospital (PGH).

Former village councilman Ronald Bae, in a fit of drunken and possibly drug-addled rage, had gone on a shooting rampage, firing away as he barged into houses and ran amuck in the Kawit market.

“My sons just went out to earn a living,” the brothers’ mother Milagros, 54, lamented as she watched over her surviving son. “I’m confused. I don’t know why this happened.”

Milagros was at home when the police arrived and told her to go to Savior Hospital in Rosario.

“The police told me that there was a shooting incident and that I should see my sons in the hospital. I got nervous. I didn’t know that my two sons were already in critical condition,” she told The STAR.

She arrived at the hospital just as her sons, the fifth and sixth of her 10 children, were being wheeled into an ambulance for transfer to PGH. Along the way, Al died from a gunshot wound to the stomach. Antonio was hit in the back.

“Antonio told us that he wanted to go with Al so he could help him carry the taho, it was too heavy. Those two were really close,” Milagros said.

Al used to work in a factory at the Export Processing Zone in Cavite but it closed shop before Christmas. Out of work, Al needed money to buy milk for his daughter Merck Cyline, so the other day he started selling taho.

Al had planned to marry the child’s mother Mary Joyce, a 17-year-old high school senior.

Despite their youth, the couple did their best to make their relationship work and raise their baby properly, according to Mary Joyce’s mother Malye Gatdula.

“Al told us he could not let his daughter go hungry,” Gatdula said. “He was worried because his daughter was already running out of milk. He looked for a job but could not immediately find any.”

Gatdula described Al as a “good and responsible” father and husband.

“He was industrious. When he was at home, he would even do the cooking, especially if my daughter was still in school. He would also take care of the baby,” Gatdula said.

Her daughter, she said, is devastated by Al’s death.