COTABATO CITY (MindaNews/10 July) – Prince Allen Diaz, 12, had just disembarked from the jeepney with his family at Quezon Avenue, on the side of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral when an improvised explosive device blew off at the lechon house across the street at around 8:40 a.m. on July 5, a Sunday.
Prince Allen never made it to church. The blast threw him off a few meters away, the shrapnels hitting the left side of his nape, his hands and back.
But he will return to the cathedral on Saturday, July11, for his last rites at 8:30 a.m. to be officiated by Msgr. Tony Pueyo.
Prince Allen, the second of three children of Patricio Diaz, Jr. and Mary Angelie Cang, was on his sixth grade in elementary at the Sacred Heart Academy.
Diaz says his son had just turned 12. “Twelve years, one month and one day, to be exact,” he told MindaNews.
He said he was too tired to drive to church that day, having just arrived from General Santos City, that’s why they took the jeepney to church. Diaz was in front while the three children were at the back.
Diaz recalls that they had just disembarked from the jeepney and Paul Andre and Pia Angela were apparently already on the sidewalk of the cathedral, as Prince always made sure they’d go in first, when the bomb went off.
Eugene Paul Andre, 13, and Pia Angela were rushed to the hospital. Pia Angela was declared out of danger later that day and sent home. Eugene Andre is still in the hospital awaiting operation.
Since Monday, hundreds of classmates, friends and relatives have flocked to the Queen of Peace Chapel along Almonte St., where Prince’s wake is.
He will be buried at the Marian Hills Memorial Park after the 8:30 mass on July 11, a Saturday.
Archbishop Orlando Quevedo, a friend of Prince Allen’s grandfather, the journalist Patricio P.. Diaz, Sr., is on retreat with the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines but sent word he will be at the mass “in mind and heart.”
Quevedo, also parish priest of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral, was concluding his homily on priests and prophecy when the bomb exploded.
The Diaz patriarch edited the Mindanao Cross and Mindanao Kris and is presently a columnist of MindaNews.
“He had a very bright future. He had a very bright future,” the elder Diaz, now based in General Santos City, shook his head as he pointed towards the white casket bearing his grandson.
One of his daughters told MindaNews that the veteran journalist, who is turning 83 in August, left the wake without their knowledge Thursday, to do an ocular inspection of the crime scene and make his own investigation.
What he found out, he told MindaNews, he would write about. (Carolyn O. Arguillas/MindaNews)
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