Cristita Padual (or Kristita Padual)
  • Sex: Female
  • Age: 29
Incident Details
  • Killed by unknown assailants in public
  • Date of Incident: March 3, 2017
  • Location of Incident: Quezon City, Metro Manila
Source(s)

Cristita Padual, 29, was killed by masked men on March 3 in the middle of her al fresco dinner on Commonwealth Avenue in QC. She was finally buried today in Bagbag Cemetery in Novaliches after her impoverished family found the money to pay the funeral parlor.

Why was she killed? Did she know the man killed at the same time about 10 meters away? Was her murder connected to a recent wave of killings in QC? What kind of life did she lead? Does her death mean anything? Still searching for the answers.

The short, happy life of Christina Padual

We found Christina’s wake last night, she who was murdered by masked assassins Friday night on Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City. Her wake was under a tarp in a vacant, unpaved corner of Batasan Hills where she grew up.

When my colleagues and I arrived in a van, people playing cards and drinking at the wake looked up anxiously. I remembered that the assassins had been seen being dropped off by a van near the Commonwealth crime scene.

I spoke with her father Samuel and Ofelia, the stepmother who raised her.

She was a happy child and a happy-go-lucky adult who made friends easily. She loved the night life, which is why she was eating a late dinner al fresco in front of the Virgo Club on that fateful Friday. (I spoke to her former employer, the owner of the Virgo Club, last Saturday. He said Christina didn’t cause any trouble and he didn’t know if she used drugs.)

Her father Samuel had migrated from Catarman, Northern Samar many years ago and has been a longtime gardener at the Batasan complex.

He told me that her real name was Cristita, but she became Christina or Tina when she began working in the clubs along Commonwealth. He said the sign that Tajuna Funeral Services had prepared for her wake misspelled her name. I also noticed that it got her age wrong. She was 29, and not 30, when she died.

Her loved ones called her Iday.

Her family swears she didn’t have any enemies. They have no idea why anyone would have wanted to kill her.

She was unmarried and didn’t have any children.

 

From CBC Canada:

Cristita or Kristita

It’s not an image you shake easily. It’s also hard for Go to shake the terrified silence of witnesses he meets at these crime scenes.

“Things like this, everyone is afraid to talk,” he explained. “We really don’t know what happened.”

Police said they found tinfoil with traces of shabu, or meth, on Kristita. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t. Finding shabu is a frequent police claim now in the Philippines.

Since President Rodrigo Duterte vowed last year to wage war against drug crime, it’s believed more than 7,000 suspected addicts and pushers have been killed.

These deaths have startled people around the world, but what sometimes gets lost are the compounding cruelties for the families left behind.

Kristita’s family would get a sad sense of that.