The brazen murder of Jessica Chavez
On February 9, 2001, fellow soldiers found 2nd Lt. Jessica Chavez close to death with a bullet wound in her chest in her own room inside the AFP headquarters in Fort Bonifacio, Makati. She died before reaching the hospital. Instead of waiting for the investigators, the officers in her battalion immediately ordered her room cleaned, discarding everything that would be useful to an investigation. Jessica served as the platoon leader of the 191st Military Police Battalion stationed in Fort Bonifacio.
After a token investigation, the AFP declared Jessica a suicide. But according to a medico-legal expert from the National Bureau of Investigation, Jessica could not have killed herself because the gun that killed her was fired far from her body. It is also difficult for someone trying to kill herself to point a gun at her own chest. Furthermore, Jessica tested negative for powder burns, and hence could not have fired the gun that killed her. Nevertheless, in its final report, the NBI still declared Jessica's death a suicide.
Two months before she died, a worried Jessica came home to her family in Poblacion, Sta. Cruz, Ilocos Sur. She confided to her grandmother that her own superiors were using her in gunrunning and other anomalous tran-sactions. Once, she was ordered to secure a shipment of arms from Mindanao at the port in Manila in order to sell them outside the AFP. To ensure her own loyalty, she was offered a large sum of money, but she refused to accept it. She informed her family of her decision to leave the military and expose the corruption in the AFP, but was unable to carry out her plan.
A few days after she was killed, her family stumbled on a cassette tape that recorded a suspicious conversation involving four people detailing an illegal operation. The AFP officials ignored the tape in their "investigation."
It is clear that Jessica was murdered to prevent her from exposing the rampant corruption within her own battalion. Her family and her classmates believe that if she were alive, she would have been one of the soldiers who mutinied on July 27.
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