The weight of the hour

The meme came thereafter, of cars crawling along EDSA with trampolines bolted to their roofs. If bodies are going to fall from the sky, the gallows humor suggested, we might as well make them bounce and spare a life and a day in court. That’s us Filipinos — cynical, perhaps jaded — forever finding levity in the gravest calamities.

This time it followed the heartbreaking story of a young man who, at 10:29 a.m. last Tuesday, jumped from the Fernando Poe Jr. Station of LRT-1 in Quezon City and landed on the pavement below, in the direct path of a car.

Like everyone else, I watched the video of the fall. It came without warning — not to anyone on the ground and certainly not to the driver, who could not have trained for something like this in driving school. It could have been you, yes you, behind the wheel. Sobering? Yes. Thought-provoking? More than we may want to admit.

The young man died. The driver, dazed and shaken, was taken into custody and brought for inquest for reckless imprudence resulting in homicide. Social media was ablaze: How can the police charge the driver when he is also a victim, having merely been in the wrong place at the wrong time, just past the morning rush, probably on his way to work or coming home if he was on the night shift?

And that is why I have always believed the police beat is the best teacher of journalism. You learn quickly that tragedy does not always arrive with context, but with sirens blaring, men in uniform, and a gaggle of kibitzers. It teaches something the internet does not: When a death, injury, or damage to property involves a vehicle, the driver is almost always brought in and processed, not because guilt has been established, but because the law requires that the chain of events be examined.

An inquest, as those of us who lingered outside prosecutor’s offices know, is a quick determination of whether probable cause exists when someone is detained without a warrant. It is not a conviction. It is not yet a charge in court. It is simply the State asking: Do we proceed? The other route, a preliminary investigation, is slower and paper-based, taken when no immediate arrest and detention are made.

Both methods ask the same question: Was a prosecutable crime committed? This Contrarian has covered enough of these to know that the first headline is rarely the final word, even if the initial custody looks dramatic, especially when someone is tagged with a “homicide.” The word itself ignites suspicion before the facts have been fully assembled.

As I write this, news came that the young man’s family declined to pursue charges, and with that came the release of the driver. There is quiet dignity in that decision. Grief often looks for a target, any target, because anger is easier to process than silence. The family could have stretched the tragedy across two households, but it chose not to, perhaps understanding what the video showed, that the fall was sudden, vertical and inescapable to those below.

The driver has gone home, but not unchanged. He will sit behind a wheel again someday, but every time he passes that stretch of EDSA, the sound will return first — the thud before the comprehension — and then the split second that followed, when the ordinary rhythm of traffic was broken into something irreversible.

There is a lesson here, and it is not tidy. Justice is less about drama than about procedure: fall, impact, custody, review and, sometimes, release. Sometimes there is no villain in the folder, only gravity and a young man’s decision to jump, and the weight of the hour that followed.