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By HERBIE GOMEZ, Editor in chief
and CONG CORRALES, Associate Editor

“AN obsessed and very sick man who stalked me.”

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This was how murdered Abba’s Orchard School 8th grader Stacey Eloisa Villar’s mother described Gregorio “Boyet” Rosabal Santos Jr., the man who confessed to the Aug. 13 murder at Morning Mist subdivision in upper Carmen. For the first time, Marideth “Madet” Mah revealed that Santos called her up after midnight, Aug. 13, but she did not answer. “My phone rang 1:35 am. He tried to talk to me but I ignored his call. I didn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore,” Mah said.

The call was made presumably after the sleeping 13-year old Villar (not 14 as reported earlier) was attacked and strangled on her bed.

Police earlier said Santos went to the gated subdivision at around 12:54 am, and then left at around 1:37 am based on security camera recordings.

Mah denied that she and Santos were estranged lovers or that they ever had an affair, explaining that the perception was due their associations.

The fifty-something Santos is married but his wife is ailing, and reportedly bedridden. “The reason we were always together was because he was a broker. He was the one who brokered this one,” said Mah, pointing to her black Toyota Hi-Lux pick-up truck.

She said she and Santos became close because he helped her with small things like trouble-shooting the pick-up truck that she bought.

Mah said she eventually rejected Santos and opted to keep her distance from him after she realized that he was already obsessed.

“He was a stalker. He always followed me. He knew the places where I go, and there was even a time he was even ahead of me. I was never afraid of him but I didn’t like what he was doing,” she said.

Mah said Santos gave her goosebumps when he allegedly said that he would never find and fall for another woman like her again.

Even after he surrendered and while she was still mourning, Mah said she was told that Santos, behind bars, sang a line in a Tagalog song apparently to explain why he did that to her daughter. The line: “Kapag tumibok ang puso…” Mah strongly denied Santos’s earlier claim that they quarreled over “financial matters.” “There was no money involved. I don’t owe him anything,” she told the Gold Star Daily. Santos was moved from the city police’s detention cell in Carmen to the city jail in Lumbia on Thursday on orders of Vice Executive Judge Henry Damasing of the Regional Trial Court of Misamis Oriental.

Damasing’s two detention commitment orders against Santos was issued on Wednesday, a day after the City Prosecutor’s Office found probable cause against the suspect for murder and theft.

City Prosecutor Fidel Macauyag did not recommend any bail for the case of murder. However, he recommended a P24-thousand bailbond for the theft case against Santos

Two key witnesses have surfaced and have executed a joint affidavit which aided prosecutors in their investigation. In their joint affidavit, Sergie Salazar and Evonitha Langomes claimed they saw Santos coming out of Mah’s rented pad at Block 10, Lot 6, Morning Mist “around 1:30 am of 13 August.”

The couple are next-door neighbors of Mah. They said they saw Santos coming out of the pad when they arrived. The witnesses also described Santos at that time, saying they saw him wearing a jacket and putting a helmet on, and that he hurriedly rode on his motorcycle.

Police earlier said the two witnesses corroborated other evidence against Santos, including the security camera recordings. In a two-page Inquest Resolution, Assistant City Prosecutor Alfonso Vicente Jr. found probable cause against Santos and recommended two separate cases for murder and theft.

Part of the resolution reads: “…we find probable cause against (Santos) for the crime of murder qualified by alevosia, abuse of superior strength and evident premeditation, for the death of the victim Stacey Eloisa Mah Villar.”

The resolution also reiterated that the theft of Villar’s IPhone 5 “was merely an afterthought and it was done to make it appear that the main motive is robbery to conceal his murderous intent.”

The prosecution office also gave weight to the sworn statement of SPO3 Ulysses Romulo who claimed that following the suspect’s surrender on Saturday, Santos expressed remorse and admitted to murdering Villar during the police investigation (with a report from lito rulona)

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Before joining the Gold Star Daily, Cong worked as the deputy director of the multimedia desk of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), and before that he served as a writing fellow of Vera Files. Under the pen name "Cong," Leonardo Vicente B. Corrales has worked as a journalist since 2008.Corrales has published news, in-depth, investigative and feature articles on agrarian reform, peace and dialogue initiatives, climate justice, and socio-economics in local and international news organizations, which which includes among others: Philippine Daily Inquirer, Business World, MindaNews, Interaksyon.com, Agence France-Presse, Xinhua News Wires, Thomson-Reuters News Wires, UCANews.com, and Pecojon-PH.He is currently the Editor in Chief of this paper.