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Chapter 1 of the story of Robert Ramos, Life and Death of a Journalist...continued.

(part 6)

© 2005, Mark Murphy
Not to be reproduced or resold without the express written permission of New England Press.
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Several people witnessed the shooting...had they wanted to help, it would have been in vain. The nearest hospital equipped to deal with my brother in law was in Manila, some 30 miles to the northeast. The news report stated that Robby died on the spot. Openly, my wife doubted that; she felt that he felt something before his death.

And she had, literally. About a week before we learned of his death, my wife mysteriously fell ill. It started as a headache, but then she felt numb in her right shoulder and neck. It both scared and shocked my wife, and she wondered out loud who had been shot, because she claimed that was just the feeling she got. Not your normal headache, perhaps not even your normal migrane. She claimed she got numb, and neither of us could figure out any reason why she would suffer those symptoms. She hadn't moved any heavy patients on her job as a Patient Care Associate; neither had I seen her do anything overly strenous that day. Not even aspirin would help the symptoms. They went away eventually...but it took several hours before my wife even began to feel better. This happened the evening of November 17th. When I looked at the stories surrounding Robby's death, they stated he died on November 18th, sometime either in the morning or the afternoon. Her symptoms would have corresponded to the time her brother was shot. The evening of November 17th would have corresponded to the morning of the 18th in Laguna; there is a 13 hour time difference between Boston and the Philippines, with the Philippines being ahead of Boston and Eastern Standard Time.

It was easily one of the most bizarre experiences I had ever encountered—and I had been through quite a few bizarre encounters that had absolutely no rational explanation. Things that would make any person seriously question their sanity...or convince them that there is an entire realm of phenomena that is beyond the scientific. Occurences that defy all logical explanation. I am convinced of one thing: whatever it was that happened to my wife that night was not the kind of thing that can be proved scientifically. The headache...probably. The tingling at the side of her head, neck and shoulder? You might come up with a logical explanation for that as well. But there is still the matter of the timing. Just funky coincidence? A skeptic in the supernatural would probably say it was just a coincidence my wife got ill at nearly the same time her brother was killed. But I've heard of other cases where one sister has become ill, and the other sister has suffered copycat symptoms—the same symptoms the other sister had, at more or less the same time.

He had become a reporter for Katapat, a small daily tabloid in Laguna. It was then we also found he was hitting on activities that were going on in the markets. Prostitution, and the pirating of CDs; he had been hitting on that, and writing sharp columns. He had at once become a force to be reckoned with. He had found out about such a racket and alerted the police to it. With them in tow, he had returned to one of the market stalls, where police had confiscated 250 pirated CDs. After that came the near fistfight, in front of police, and the threat that life would soon end...

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