ILOILO City – When Angelo Claveria, the Ilonggo overseas worker who died in South Korea, was buried yesterday at the municipal cemetery of Cabatuan, Iloilo, residents in his Barangay Zone IV Poblacion, were asking: Why would anybody kill a kind man?
“He was too young to die,” said a sobbing Caridad Camen, an aunt of Claveria.
She couldn’t help herself but cry, she said, because her nephew was “mabuot nga bata” (a good young man).
The 34-year-old Claveria, a Marine Transportation graduate, went to South Korea in July 2014 to work as a metal cutter. He went missing in January 2016 and just this April 3, his skeletal remains were found inside a septic tank of a water purifier plant in the city of Hwaseong, Gyeonggi province.
“We want justice of Angelo. We ask for nothing less,” said Ma. Giena Baranda, a resident of Barangay Zone IV Poblacion.
Baranda said she knew Claveria to be a hardworking.
“He strove to find a good job to help his family,” she said.
Rosalinda Bordon had similar sentiments. The governor should to everything to bring to justice Claveria’s killer, she stressed.
Claveria was buried at around 3 p.m. after a requiem mass at the Parish of San Nicolas de Tolentino Church in Cabatuan a week after his skeletal remains were repatriated on May 27.
Grieving family members and relatives wore white shirts printed with the words “Justice for Angelo Claveria.”
According to Claveria’s mother Angelita, her son actually wanted to look for another job.
During a brief vacation in 2015, he promised to work doubly hard in South Korea so he could finally finish their house’s renovation, according to Angelita.
“Whoever killed my son should be arrested,” she said. “The culprit should suffer a fate similar to my son’s, or even worse.”
Claveria took a short one-month vacation to Cabatuan in September 2015. He returned to South Korea the following month and had not communicated to his family since January 2016.
Angelita said the last time she was able to talk to her son was on Christmas eve of 2015.
He had not mentioned any problem during his brief vacation, the mother said.
Angelita said the identification and arrest of her son’s killer or killers could, to a certain degree, assuage her family’s pain.
She described her son as “waay gamo nga bata (not a trouble-maker).”
South Korean authorities were zeroing in on another overseas Filipino worker as suspect, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs.
As of this writing, the investigation was ongoing.
According to Claveria’s sister Jeanette, someone completely emptied her brother’s bank account. She believed the culprit was the killer, too.
South Korean authorities said Claveria was struck with a hard object on the head./PN
