A child in conflict with the law (CICL) died in the arms of his mother here, as the reality on the need for government or private sector to establish rehabilitation center for minors here.

The child of 16, according to Tagbilaran City chief Police Superintendent George Vale has been in and out of police and social welfare commission since ten years old, when he figured out in petty crimes.

A law on Juvenile Justice however bans the imprisonment of minor offenders it only provides for law enforcers to turn over the offender to a social welfare facility, which the government has yet to put up.

He should have been on a law-mandated juvenile-rehabilitation facility, but in Bohol, not one such establishment is present.

To date, the Provincial Peace and Order Council (PPOC) has in its pipelines such a facility, but it has not gone beyond the blue print. Meanwhile, Tagbilaran City is closer to reality with a Paglaum Center now being built in Cabawan District, city sources bared.

Recently, the same minor was invited to the city police station over his implication of a theft when he took a service fire-arm of a security guard who incidentally fell asleep while manning a post, according to city police authorities.

A security camera footage showed the child offender, with a bandaged foot as the primary suspect.

Consequent post-crime operations confirmed the child’s involvement as authorities tracked the handgun which the child offender disposed to a buyer.

The child, who the city police has committed to the city social welfare, has also been consequently turned over to the parents, owing to the lack of a facility to keep the child for rehabilitation as an act of restorative justice.

Owing to his habitual tangles with the law, the child has been committed by an unnamed court to a Department of Social Welfare and Development rehabilitation center in Argao, Cebu, but reports confirmed the child’s escape from the reformative facility.

That night, of August 26, in Tagbilaran where the child offender homed after escaping Argao, he was being fetched by his parents after police tactical investigation relative to the gun-theft, also recommended the child offender to get to a hospital for his bandaged feet.

While on astride a motorcycle, sitting between his father and mother, a gunman pumped a bullet into the boy’s head, instantly killing him.

A newspaper report bared that the assailant casually walked off the crime scene.

Police said they could not do anything because the City DSWD could not assure the kids commitment due to lack of an appropriate facility. All they could do, as the child was an escapee from Argao facility, was to turn him over to the parents. It was there when the kid was shot to death.

Following a bind law authorities put themselves into with minor offenders, legal luminary in Bohol suggests police to rather turn over kid offenders to the courts who signed their commitments to a reformatory facility.

“Turning over the minor offender to the DSWD may be raising a question of jurisdiction, as much as a court has already ordered the commitment to a DSWD facility,” said fiscal Macario Delusa, at the Provincial Peace and Order Council, Thursday.

Earlier, City police chief Vale said they could not send the kid back to Argao, due to lack of resources and material time.

Tagbilaran City however is now fast-tracking the construction of its Paglaum Center, a CICL facility operated by the local government, city police chief Col Vale confirmed. (rac/PIA-7/Bohol)