MANILA (Sept. 23, 2026) — Clarita Alia says she refused to let a police officer take her eldest son without a warrant. The officer, she says, answered with a warning: her sons would be killed "one by one."
Weeks later, Richard, 18, was stabbed to death. Three more sons would follow.
On Friday, Sept. 25, Nanay Clarita, 72, will tell that story to the Truth Commission at its third public session. A vegetable vendor at the Bankerohan Public Market in Davao City, she has spent more than two decades asking why no one has answered for the deaths of her boys.
Her testimony will take place starting 9:30 at the Plenary Hall of the Pope Pius XII Catholic Center, UN Avenue, Manila. It will be livestreamed on the commission’s Facebook and YouTube channels at @truthcommissionph.
The Four Sons
All four were stabbed to death. They are Richard , 18, killed on July 17, 2001; Christopher, 16, killed on Oct. 20, 2001; Bobby, 14, killed on Nov. 3, 2002, and Fernando, 15, killed on April 13, 2007.
Their killings began years before Rodrigo Duterte's national anti-drug campaign, at a time when killings of suspected drug offenders and criminals, attributed to the so-called Davao Death Squad, were already being reported in Davao City. Rights advocates later assert that the killings in Davao became the template for the “drug war” that Duterte launched throughout the Philippines starting in 2016, when he became president. Thousands were killed in the campaign.
The Warning
Nanay Clarita has said that police tried to take Richard without a warrant and that she resisted. She later told Human Rights Watch that a senior officer said her sons would be killed "one by one."
Her testimony will cover what she heard herself, what she took the warning to mean and what happened next. The commission will keep that separate from what she learned later from other people and from documents.
After three of her sons were killed, Nanay Clarita feared Fernando was next. She sent him away from Davao City. He came back, and in 2007 he too was killed.
Her testimony asks the public to see the brothers not as names in police files, but as the sons of a woman who kept trying to protect them.
A Mother Who Would Not Stay Quiet
Nanay Clarita has said that her sons were at times accused of offenses or had run-ins with the police. Her position has not changed: if they had broken the law, they should have been arrested and brought before a judge, not killed.
With help from Tambayan Center for Children's Rights, a Davao City nonprofit that worked with street children and other young people at risk, she went first to village officials. She then took her complaints to the Commission on Human Rights and the deputy ombudsman for Mindanao.
At the commission's public inquiry into killings in Davao in 2009, other witnesses testified behind closed doors. Nanay Clarita spoke in the open. She named police officers as her main suspects and said no real investigation followed. These remain allegations that require careful examination, and her testimony will place her account, her appeals for help and the responses she received on the public record.
No One Held to Account
More than two decades on, Nanay Clarita says she has seen no accountability. A 2025 essay from Human Rights Watch reported that no case over her sons' killings had reached court and that the killers remained free.
The session will ask what officials knew and what investigations followed. It will also ask why the paths open to a grieving mother led nowhere, and how frightened witnesses can be protected.
Before the Drug War
The commission will use her testimony to examine reports of killings in Davao City before the 2016 national campaign, including what carried over into later years and what changed. It will also look at how the stigma of an accusation, poverty and deep distrust of the authorities shaped the lives of families like hers long before the country took notice.
For Nanay Clarita, Sept. 25 is not about police records or historical debates. It is about Richard, Christopher, Bobby and Fernando, and about a mother who buried four sons and kept speaking out despite her grief and her fear.
"I do not want another mother to cry or another child to die," she has said.
The commission's public sessions aim to put survivors' testimony and other evidence on the public record, in pursuit of truth and, eventually, justice.