MikeLigalig.com

AN assistant prosecutor of the Cebu City Prosecutor’s Office was shot, while trapped in a traffic jam, by two men on a motorcycle on Ma. Gochan St., Barangay Mambaling, Cebu City.

The gunman attacked Assistant City Prosecutor Patrick Ian Osorio about 100 meters away from the Mambaling Police Station and only 20 meters away from the N. Bacalso Ave. national highway.

Osorio, a 36-year-old father of four, was hit four times—twice in the right side of his abdomen, once in the right leg and once in the right arm. He was alone in the car during the attack, but managed to step outside and yell for help.

A trisikad driver and PO1 Jeric Caballero, a beat patrol policeman of the Mambaling Police Station, rushed Osorio to the Miller Hospital in a taxi. He was taken to the operating room.

Two trisikad drivers who witnessed the shooting told SPO4 Alex Dacua, team leader of the responding Homicide Section investigators, that the attack took place at 4:25 p.m.

Witness Romulo (full name withheld) said a Toyota Revo (GPB 203)—later identified as the car Osorio was driving—stopped on Ma. Gochan St., in the middle of a traffic jam.

Romulo said he and his fellow trisikad driver, who were fixing a vehicle, noticed a red motorcycle without a plate number as it turned right and stopped near the passenger side of Osorio’s car.

Two men rode the motorcyle, both wearing helmets that fully covered their faces, Romulo told reporters.

Without alighting from the motorcycle, the gunman pulled out a gun and fired two shots that shattered the windshields.

Romulo said the culprits sped away and turned right, heading south.

Called for help

The wounded assistant prosecutor disembarked from his car and shouted for help.

A team of policemen headed by Mambaling Police Station Chief Andres Bayarcal immediately arrived in the area.

While P01 Caballero and a concerned trisikad driver brought Osorio to the hospital, Bayarcal led his men in trying to chase the culprits.

Bayarcal, in an interview, said they lost sight of the culprits and failed to arrest them.

Operatives from the Theft and Robbery Section, Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Bureau and agents from the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group also tried to pursue the attackers.

One empty shell from a caliber .45 was found at the crime scene.

Dacua said his team is still looking into all the possible motives for the attack, including the possibility that it was work-related.

NBI’s help

Director Medardo de Lemos said the National Bureau of Investigation 7 will help probe the case, while personnel from the justice department’s protection program are securing the hospital where Osorio was brought.

Osorio followed in the footsteps of his father, lawyer Jesus Osorio. But he could have chosen a different path: priesthood.

In an interview with radio dySS last night, Jesus said that Patrick and elder brother Tata enrolled at a seminary in Mabolo in high school. But by the third year, Patrick told his father he didn’t want to be a priest.

Instead, he took up AB Political Science at the University of San Carlos and would have continued his law studies there, but was late for enrolment because he was out mountain-climbing with friends.

He earned his law degree at the University of San Jose Recoletos and passed the bar in 1998.

The younger Osorio practiced law in his hometown in Dalaguete for five years. He was then offered a position at the Department of Justice in Manila but later transferred to Cebu City, where he has since been working as an assistant prosecutor.

Family court

Jesus said that after work, Patrick usually drove through the Cebu South Coastal Road to pick up his children from school in Inayawan.

Patrick has four children. The eldest is Grade 2, the second is Grade 1 and the third is still in kindergarten. The youngest is scheduled to start school this year. His wife is pregnant with their fifth child.

“I talked with Fiscal (Mary Ann) Castro and she said that Patrick has no enemies. She would know better about the activities of a prosecutor,” Jesus said in Bisaya in the same radio interview.

“He handles a family court where cases are not controversial but personal,” Jesus continued.
Osorio is assigned as the resident prosecutor of the 24th branch of the Regional Trial Court, a family court. He is known to be a quiet, approachable man who steers clear of controversies.

Last Monday, when hearings at the Cebu City Regional Trial Courts were scarce, Patrick was one of only five prosecutors who attended hearings.

Find them

Castro, said Jesus, theorized that the attack could only be work-related. Jesus could not offer any theories of his own but only wants a speedy investigation of the attack.
“Since what shouldn’t happen already happened, I just hope that it will be immediately investigated,” he said.

While Osorio conducts inquest and preliminary investigation on complaints filed before the Office of the Cebu City Prosecutor, co-workers find it hard to believe that he may have been shot because of one of those cases.

“He never spoke about getting threats or anything like that,” one co-worker said.

Osorio was appointed as prosecutor in 2004, during the term of Regional State Prosecutor Antonio Arellano, six years after he passed the bar exams.

In his 2006 Statement of Assets Liabilities and Net Worth, he posted the lowest net worth among prosecutors that year, at P122,000.

Of the cases he handled, only few attracted media’s attention.

One was his resolution recommending the filing of charges against SPO1 Mateo Yanson, who was later found guilty of the murder of moneylender Pilar Hernandez, 61,
and her secretary, 55-year-old Wivina Pancho.

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