Just for kicks

The media accounts of how promising advertising executive Kristelle “Kae” Davantes was killed made me cringe. Late as the hour may have been, she made it back to her gated, guarded metropolitan subdivision home.  Six men on board a red Honda City that had sticker access to the village accosted her as she was about to enter the house gate. The motive was supposed to have been simple robbery.  Davantes was supposedly a “chance victim.”

Yet when Kae’s body was recovered, it showed she had been hogtied using the car’s seat belt. A handkerchief was also stuffed in her mouth. As Kae supposedly saw her perpetrators’ faces and the plate number of their vehicle, they decided to kill her. They first tried to strangle her with the cord of a cell phone charger.  As she valiantly resisted, one of the principal suspects, Samuel Decimo, took the victim out of her car and repeatedly stabbed her in the neck using a 20-peso knife.  “I cannot remember how many times I stabbed her,” Decimo confessed. And when asked why he committed the heinous act, he supposedly retorted “wala lang.” Several days later, before being arrested for Kae’s killing, Decimo was involved in another crime. 

As one netizen put it, “buhay ang kinuha nila buhay rin nila ang dapat na kabayaran.” Indeed, there is a line in the sand, drawn between men and beasts, and it is our actions in life which determine on which side we stand.

By dispelling French philosopher Sarte’s mauvaise foi, the full weight of responsibility for one’s actions becomes existentially realized. It is this responsibility which gives rise to accountability. Having consciously chosen to abduct, rob, and then kill a woman whose only mistake was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, Kae’s murderers undertook a series of poor decisions which progressively deteriorated from bad to worse. In committing barbaric acts, they chose to distance themselves from humanity and cross the line in the sand. It is too convenient to argue that events had simply “spiraled out of control”. For sure, such choices were made with little time for reflection yet that does not change the fact that at the time they were being made, the assailants were fully aware of what they were doing.

To a certain extent, our laws recognize this philosophical rubicon of unforgivable acts. Under our Family Code, a parent who sexually abuses a child losses parental authority permanently. Such an act is deemed so terrible that no amount of repentance or reformation could rectify the wrong done to the child. But if our laws allow for the forfeiture of certain rights based on extreme acts of depravity, what of one’s right to life? Are there acts terrible enough that we may say the culprit has forfeited his right to live by their very commission?

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Josef Fritzl comes back to mind. In 2008, the 73-year-old Austrian made international headlines after it was discovered that he had imprisoned and raped his daughter in their basement for 24 years. Under the guise of needing help to install a new door on his basement “study,” Josef had lured his daughter down into the dungeon where he drugged and enslaved her. She was 18. Over the next 24 years, his daughter gave birth to 7 children, four of whom he left imprisoned with their mother and three he brought upstairs where he lived with his incredibly unsuspecting wife. The eldest amongst the imprisoned incestuous offspring was 19 years old before she first saw the light of day. By that time, her view of the outside world was nothing but terrifying.

More recent, was the case of Ariel Castro from Cleveland, Ohio who kidnapped three women and held them captive for a decade. With unbelievable bravado, he claimed that he was not violent — despite the diaries kept by the three victims throughout their captivity, in which one entry described how he tried to abort a baby one of the victims was carrying by putting her on a “tea” diet and forcing her to perform gruelling exercises each day.

That did not work and so “Castro punched and kicked her, jumped on her stomach, and starved her for days to terminate the pregnancy.” He later kept the placenta in the refrigerator “as a memento.”

After being sentenced to 1000 years with no opportunity for parole, he committed suicide inside his prison cell one month later.

Should we not be incensed? We regularly read about cruel and inhuman cases like these in the news. The 1987 Constitution and our Supreme Court recognize the validity of imposing the death penalty for heinous crimes yet Congress in 2006 again decided to suspend its application.

Kae was a fresh-eyed professional with potentially more than 50 years of life ahead of her. Her killers didn’t just rob her of a measly P3,000. They stole the years of life she will never have, the capacity and potential to make a difference in the world, the joys and tears of raising a family and the privilege of aging gracefully. Not to mention the fact that they punctured a hole in the lives of her family, now bereft and filled with bitter hurt and tears.

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With five of the six suspects in custody, the members of Task Force Kae now consider her case solved.  Similarly, Kae’s relatives hope that her killers’ arrest will bring her “peace of mind wherever she is.”  I, for one, do not think that this matter is closed. There are just too many of these incidents involving innocent, helpless individuals that happen in our society. And for so long as these violent crimes continue, I do not think that Kae and victims like her will truly be at peace.        

If Decimo and his cohorts can rob and kill random victims “just for kicks,” does not the State have the obligation to “kick” them “justly” out of society and provide a chilling example so that others like them will be deterred from committing these dastardly acts?      

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“Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.”

                                                         – Woody Allen

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