So, on March 2 at 8:08 a.m., I received a call from an unknown caller. Having just been notified by my Shopee app that a delivery was due that day, I answered the call, expecting the delivery rider to be on the other line, as per usual.
Instead, I was met by an unnaturally low male voice looking for “Atty. Micah Dagaerag”. Without confirming immediately, I asked him what it was about. He introduced himself as a certain “Atty. Jason Mendez” and he apparently had been hired by someone to take my life.
I asked him what the threat was related to, but he said he did not know. He made a point to say, however, that while he had been offered P45,000, they had actually not yet agreed with the mastermind on the price. Then he paused, as if waiting for me to make some kind of counter-offer.
I refused to bite. I told him he can do whatever he wanted, telling him that I know of nothing that I have done that could deserve being summarily executed for. (And I had no money for a counter-offer anyway.)
“We will all have to die,” I continued telling him in Bisaya, “but I’m okay with that, because I have known the love and grace of the Lord, and He will meet me if you kill me. I hope you also find that same love and grace, and turn to Him from your sins. God bless you, sir.”
He started his reply with a “That’s up to you” but having felt like I had said all that I needed and wanted to say, I promptly ended the call, even while he was still in the middle of saying something. The entire call lasted five minutes and 14 seconds.
Receiving a death threat is stressful enough. But what I discovered about what reliefs were available to me as a lawyer in response to such threat became even more disheartening.
First, the local police couldn’t do anything more than receive my incident report, aka blotter, since there was no lawyer in reality named Jason Mendez.
Second, no one from the local PNP, NBI, NTC, Cybercrime Division was equipped to trace a mobile phone call.
Third, even after the increase in lawyer killings over the past few years, my local IBP chapter’s leadership literally did nothing after I let them know about the death threat.
So here I was, a lawyer who received a threat to his life for no good reason, was basically left to his own devices by the authorities that he had thought were prepared to serve, protect, and support a person deeply, indeed mortally, in distress.
I was basically just repeatedly told to be careful, install security cameras, and get a gun. Nothing more.
Thankfully, some lawyers did offer more useful help in their own personal capacities. Through them I was eventually given the location of the caller, in a certain city in Maguindanao. Beyond that, however, no more information about the person could be retrieved.
Still, that gave me some breathing room to think that it was probably some scammer who saw my mobile number on the internet and wanted some money.
All of the cases I currently handle as a lawyer, after all, are rather too tame and small-scale to instigate a desire for murder.
But it shouldn’t be this easy for some person, scammer or otherwise, to issue death threats and evade accountability. I have never had to second guess the people around me to be would-be assassins, but now I have had to.
Every time I tell my mother that I have to go to court or somewhere in the city, it is never without much worry and dread.
This person, this “Atty. Jason Mendez”, whether or not he really will take my life, has already taken our sense of security and safety in the community.
And the authorities offer only a pittance for help.
This is wrong. I grieve and mourn.
We shouldn’t live in a country like that. Risk is always present in life, but no society should be this favourable and accommodating towards evildoers. We need to at least not make it so easy for people to be criminals.
We need culture change in law enforcement. We need updates in public technological services. And we shouldn’t have had to wait to be threatened with death to start to care about it.
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Author’s email: [email protected]
