No room for fall guys

No room for fall guys | Daily Tribune

There is absolutely no room for a whitewash here. Two young lives were cut short in an incident that investigators themselves admitted was entirely preventable. But because this case involves an elite collegiate sports program with a powerful alumni group and influential backers, the public is rightfully skeptical. There is a very strong possibility that we might see a sanitized, more corporate-friendly outcome of the probe.

The initial list of respondents looks less like a targeted strike against the culpable and more like a fishing expedition. It is genuinely baffling to see the names of low-level administrative personnel, physical therapists, student managers and even utility staff dragged into a criminal complaint.

Their only fault — if you can even call it that — was following the top-down directives of the head coach who masterminded this fatal team-building trip.

The absurdity of this dragnet hasn’t gone unnoticed. The family of Ateneo men’s volleyball coach Vince Mangulabnan — one of the administrative staff members included in the complaint for simply booking the bus that the Blue Eagles used — took to social media to air their displeasure.

For one, Mangulabnan’s sister, Maji, pointed out that her brother doesn’t deserve this kind of reckless treatment from the very institution he has loyally served, both as a volleyball coach and as a staff member at the University Athletic Office.

Rank-and-file employees do not dictate training drills. They do not have the power to call off a dangerous water activity. To include them with the actual decision-makers in the same list of respondents doesn’t just dilute accountability; it actively punishes the vulnerable for simply doing their jobs.

Worse, this shotgun approach usually paves the way for the creation of “fall guys.” The public has seen this script play out many times before: Influential figures slip into the background while their subordinates are sacrificed.

If prosecutors waste their energy pinning the blame on utility workers and support staff just to provide quick results and quench the public’s thirst for justice, the real culprits will go unpunished and the systemic rot within our varsity programs will remain untouched.

The PNP-CIDG and state prosecutors need to do a sharper job of filtering the evidence. Just like the Baterbonia and Adili families, the public demands justice — but it must be authentic and accurate. We want the people who actually called the shots, authorized the trip and ignored basic safety protocols to stand trial and answer for their criminal negligence.

This tragedy should be a brutal reckoning for sports governance and student-athlete safety in the country. But for that deterrence to mean anything, the legal outcome must be fair.

Now the ball is in the DoJ’s court. It must exercise rigid scrutiny to ensure that no whitewash happens, no innocent employee is sacrificed by a system they couldn’t control, and those truly guilty face the full, unyielding force of the law.

The families of Baterbonia and Adili are crying out for justice. The public is watching. It’s time for the DoJ to step up and prove that no whitewash will happen and that only those who actually masterminded the trip will be held accountable for the loss of two young athletes who could have been future stars of Philippine basketball.