5.7 [Tabloid 7]

Headline: Snatcher Todas sa 'Mystery Man'

The reason this headline appealed to me is that I really did not know what the word "todas" meant. I then asked my mom, being always a great resource whenever it came to hard Filipino vocabulary, what it meant; and she explained that it meant "patay" or "dead." A second reason would be that a "mystery man" subject always seemed interesting, given that the names of both the snatcher and the mystery man are not given. Why a tabloid headline would give such a vague, indefinite title provokes much thought.

I was at the counter of a grocery store in Quezon when, at the corner of my eye I saw a vision of one man mysteriously walking around a shelf of wine bottles. I kept a close watch on him. That man--a tall, dark-skinned, dark-haired figure--looked over at a bottle and drew it from the shelf. He held up so as to look at the label properly. Shaking the bottle slowly, he slipped it inside an eco bag that looked like a shopping bag. After a while, he took about five bags of chips from another shelf and proceeded to the counter to pay, after which he walked out of the door without even paying for the bottle of wine.

Outside the grocery store, a beggar with raggedy clothes interrupts him and asks for money. The man ignored the beggar. The beggar, however, kept begging for money, even resorting to following after the man as the man walked away.

After such time when the man had already enough of the beggar's panhandling, the man stood still and looked into the distance, as if to deliberately show a sign of unconcern. The beggar, startlingly, intercepted the man's eco bag which had the stolen bottle of wine in it. Furious, the man pushed the beggar to the ground and beat the beggar up until the beggar bled and died on the spot.

Claiming his wine bottle back, the man started to the opposite direction when, from a hidden corner, a mysterious man showed up and started toward the man with the wine bottle. The mysterious man pulled a gun out of his pocket and shot the other man.

The man with the wine bottle fell to the ground, dead beside the beggar that had just died

Both snatchers died that day.