Purplehood wrote:I don't know about this. Is this guy just plain stupid or was he already resigned to being busted?
The shooting took place in one of Metro Manila's seemingly infinite number of tiny, confined alleyways. If you look closely at the photo, you'll see it's about the same width as the entry to a one-car garage. So if the killer had decided that was the best access he was going to have, he didn't have many options. If he had staged himself just around that wall you see to the killer's left, that pretty much was his
only option at the time. This sounds like a revenge murder, and the shooter probably didn't give much of a thought to better concealment.
Trust me, the number of violent crimes that go unsolved there is staggering. Greater Manila has a population of over 20 million; compare that to the entire State of Texas at about 24 million. The City of Houston proper has a population density of about 3,300 per square mile. Greater Manila? About
47,000 per square mile.
A criminal can blend into a huge throng of people in literally seconds, almost anywhere.
The area is economically depressed, and the wealth compressed into a small upper-class. The 2009 GDP of Greater Houston was $440.4 billion; for the same year, all of the Philippines was the equivalent of $161.2 billion, with Metro Manila accounting for almost exactly one-third of that, or around $54 billion. So to put that in scale, Houston has 7% of the population density of Manila, about twice the geographical area, and 816% of the GDP. Another comparison: the Houston Police Department is staffed at about one officer per 420 citizens; the Philippine Integrated National Police (law enforcement is a centralized operation in the PI) is staffed at about one officer per 1,550 citizens overall; the ratio is worse in Metro Manila due to the population density.
As you can imagine, crime is rampant in many parts of Manila. The murderer probably didn't care one way or another whether he was seen, or whether he thought Dagsa might be snapping a photo.
When I lived there, political assassinations, successful or not, were routine. One, about three blocks from where I lived, left a Mercedes riddled with over 30 rounds, but the politician and his driver escaped unhurt; the shooters were never caught. For more routine crimes like armed robbery or your day-to-day murders, knives were far more common than firearms...guns were simply too expensive for the average street thug. Major, violent street gangs like OXO or Sigue Sigue would have a few guns, but those were controlled only by their highest-ranking members. The rank and file had knives, bolos (machetes), and impact instruments.
