CAMP MAKABULOS, Tarlac City – Police on Friday filed before the provincial prosecutor’s office cases of double murder against two suspects in connection with the October 25 killing of Reynaldo Malazo, vice mayor of San Manuel town, and his neighbor Romeo Barrientos.
In a statement, Supt. Rudy Lacadin, chief of the Tarlac provincial police office, said the suspects, Ronaldo Zotomayor and Rogel de Leon, had been “positively identified” by three eyewitnesses “through several pictures shown to them in the rouge gallery.”
Malazo, who had served for nine years as mayor of San Manuel before he ran and won last year as vice mayor, was talking with his driver in front of his house when shot to death. Barrientos, his neighbor, was also killed.
According to the police, Zotomayor “has involvement in other criminal activities.”
He is also the primary suspect in the August 25, 2005, killing of former Board Member Fernando de Jesus inside his house in Barangay Carangian here. Among the items taken in the De Jesus robbery-with-homicide case was the 70-year-old victim’s handgun. When the police searched the house that Zotomayor was renting in Barangay Suizo here on December 6, 2005, they found two handguns, a hand grenade, three magazines and 20 bullets. One of the handguns was De Jesus’ stolen handgun.
As a result, Zotomayor was charged with illegal possession of explosives, firearms and ammunitions before the regional trial court in this city.
Zotomayor was also charged in court in connection with robbery-with-holdup cases in Barangay Caturay in Gerona town on May 20, 2008 and at the Razon’s Restaurant on F. Tañedo St. also in this city.
Zotomayor was arrested in 2005 but jumped bail, police said. “He is nowhere to be found,” the statement said.
De Leon, whom the police identified as the one who shot Barrientos, is also facing a robbery/holdup charge. On December 11, 2006, Gerona police arrested him after a delivery man of Gemini Exchange Incorporated was robbed of P14,000. Like Zotomayor, De Leon was granted bail. Police said he could no longer be found in his last known address in Paniqui town.
Lacadin said the two suspects were “members of a criminal group engaged in robbery/holdup and gun-for-hire activities not only in Tarlac but also in nearby provinces.”
Task Force Malazo, which was created to investigate the killing of Malazo and Barrientos, is looking for the identity of the third suspect in the killing.
