Twice hurt: How one man survived a fatal car crash but couldn’t tell his tale

BUGUIAS/KABAYAN, Benguet - A fair warning was given to me as I approached 32-year-old Franklin Pay-oen’s hospital ward in Buguias, Benguet.

As I entered the room on an overcast Friday morning, along with the nurses who made their rounds to check Franklin’s temperature, blood pressure and heart rate, my eyes went into his: glassy, bloodshot and stained with traces not only of the painkillers given to him last night to ease his headache, but also of dried wounds around his face.

Two minutes after his regular checkup, I made my spiel: I am working on a story about what happened to him from Saturday night to Wednesday evening. It was a time frame that for Franklin, was out of his grasp; like a kite whose strings snapped mid-air. I needed his help to reconstruct everything that happened in those four days.

It would be a gamble. He said yes. I asked his elder sister Lourdes to sit beside me in case language barriers get in the way. I gave him a choice: Would he prefer to have this conversation recorded through an iPhone, or through a network camera that I suspected would be intimidating with its size and imposing lights? In a mumble, he said he’s okay with the network camera. I told him to just look at me so the lights do not get in the way of his vision.

We started rolling.

Franklin Pay-oen and his cousins were on their way to Nueva Vizcaya to clean their grandmother's tomb for All Saints' Day when a tragic accident happened. He is still grappling with the loss. Dano Tingcungco

Sunday

Everything started with a trip.

According to reports from Kabayan, Benguet police, after a late-night session on Saturday, October 26, Franklin with his cousins Leonard Pay-oen, and Samuel and Dennis Begya decided to go to Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya to start work on cleaning their grandmother’s tomb for All Saints’ Day.

It was a decision that apparently did not involve any member of Franklin’s immediate family; Franklin’s mother Lalaine told me she did not see Franklin leave, nor did he tell her he would leave for the night.

But when Sunday passed without having heard from the four, Lalaine said through a nurse who helped translate: “Si Salvador, 'yung tatay ng mga bata. Nu'ng wala silang narinig sa kanila, they went to Vizcaya, tinanong nila 'yung dapat na puntahan doon. Sinabi nila na hindi pumunta 'yung mga bata doon. The day after pumunta na kami sa police station para mag-report.”

The family also took to Facebook to report the missing four cousins.

CCTV video from a part of the main highway in Kabayan showed the silver Tamaraw FX that the cousins drove passing by around 3:20 p.m. The FX passed slowly. There was no other footage of the cousins’ drive after they passed that section of the highway.

Monday-Tuesday

Buguias is a town that, on the map, sits on one end of a highway triangle to other neighboring towns in Benguet province. To the west, the highway leads to Atok; to its north, Mount Data and Mankayan on the northwest side; south of Buguias are the towns of Kabayan and Bokod.

To get to Nueva Vizcaya, the cousins would have to take the road going south, crossing Mount Pulag along Kabayan town before going to Bokod, before heading east to Dupax del Norte, going northeast to Bambang before reaching Bayombong.

There are three Benguet towns the cousins would have to pass through before leaving the province.

Acting on the missing person’s report from Franklin’s family, the Buguias police relayed the information to neighboring Kabayan and Bokod police. That Monday the three police stations launched a search.

But they did not know where to start on the 50-kilometer stretch of the highway that crosses the three towns.

Until an accident encounter on Wednesday, October 30.

Wednesday

Police Lieutenant Gilbert Anselmo, the chief of Kabayan Police Station, said that around 11 a.m. on Wednesday, some police officers of Kabayan made their way along the stretch of Kabayan-Bokod Road to a school for a lecture with some students.

At a sharp curve along the road, near a makeshift waiting shed, one of the police officers noticed a man in dirty, disheveled clothes, walking aimlessly along the highway. What could have been a passing encounter turned another way when the officer saw blood on his head and shoulders.

“Nasa gilid siya ng kalsada, tapos nakita (ng pulis) 'yung mga sugat niya. Iyon, tinanong siya. Medyo tuliro siya tapos nagpapara siya ng mga sasakyan. ‘Di siya pinapansin kaya binaba siya ng kasamahan namin,” Anselmo said.

Initial questioning yieled no answers from the man, until he managed to say his name: Franklin Pay-oen.

“Nagkataon na isa siya sa mga hinahanap namin. Nag-post sila (pamilya) sa Facebook na may 4 missing kasama 'yung sasakyan,” he recalled.

As the police matched Franklin’s identity and linked him to his other three missing cousins, the police instantly knew what they needed to look for next: the rest of the cousins and the FX that was supposed to take them to Vizcaya.

Knowing Franklin at the time couldn’t answer more contextual questions from the police, they went simplistic: Where is the car? At this point, the police said, Franklin pointed them to a general direction south, going into a ravine.

A little less than one kilometer down from the highway, Kabayan police found what they have been looking for for three days: a silver TSY-416 plate FX at the foot of a ravine, whose make was almost unrecognizable with the damage it sustained.

Found in a ravine a kilometer away from the highway was the vehicle Franklin Pay-oen and his cousins rode on the way to Nueva Vizcaya. Inside were the bodies of Franklin's cousins. Photo courtesy: Kabayan Police

Inside were the bodies of Leonard, Samuel and Dennis. A police progress report indicated the three died on the spot. The report also said that Samuel was the driver, and that he allegedly fell asleep while behind the wheel, causing the FX to lose its direction and fall into the ravine.

What was not clear in the report was how Franklin survived and ended up on the curb of a highway with no residents for three days.

Franklin still couldn’t speak.

Wednesday-Thursday

Alongside retreving the remains of Leonard, Samuel and Dennis, the police took Franklin to Dennis Molintas Memorial Hospital, a district hospital in Bokod town south of Kabayan where police found the wreckage.

According to doctors I spoke to on condition of anonymity, when Franklin was brought to them, he was dehydrated. He registered a blood pressure of 120/90, and sustained bruises on his left eye. Franklin also had a wound on his head but was already dry when they saw it.

The doctors I spoke to also said that three hours into his confinement, Franklin started to remember bits and pieces of the accident. But the only thing he knew was about their vehicle falling into a deep ravine, nothing else.

It was also in this hospital they said where Franklin was told his three other cousins died. He was saddened by what happened, but to what extent his expression did not clarify.

The same day, some uncles asked that Franklin be moved to Lutheran Hospital in their hometown Buguias, 41 kilometers north of Bokod.

It was in Lutheran Hospital where I met Franklin, sitting on his hospital bed with dextrose for hydration. The wounds on his face and back were starting to heal. He was complaining of a headache when I sat down with him. But when I asked him if he was ready to share his story, he said he was.

There was light on his face, but his memory was still shrouded.

Friday

Franklin said the only thing he could remember at this point was the time they left for Nueva Vizcaya. It was Sunday dawn but after that point of leaving, everything was black.

The next thing he could remember, he wriggled himself out of the wreckage after waking up from the fall. But as he got out, the vehicle fell further. He could not remember who he was with.

“Paggising mo, 'di ba, sabi mo sa akin umalis ka ng sasakyan?” I asked.

“Oo,” he said.

“Anong nangyari sunod?”

“Nahulog yata ulit 'yung sasakyan. Noong umalis ako wala akong alam.”

“Nung umalis ka, anong ginawa mo sunod?”

“Pumunta lang ako sa kalsada, sa gilid. Hindi ko alam na kasama ko sila.’’

Franklin could not remember why he climbed from the ravine to the highway. All he could remember was that no one stopped to help him. Not even a drop of water for him with the many vehicles passing by the Kabayan-Bokod Road, a main trade route. “Nagpapara ako ng ibang sasakyan, pero walang huminto.”

Silence punctuated many parts of our interview, with his eyes looking westward to his family watching us talk on camera. But he was not looking at anyone in particular; he was trying to remember, like grasping a stack of hay that keeps falling.

To help him out, I asked him what he remembered feeling during those three days. “Gutom na gutom ako kasi ilang araw din hindi ako kumakain doon.”

When our news team revisited the crash site, it was more apparent how Franklin’s survival was nothing less than a miracle. The ravine their FX fell on was steep enough to almost reach a 90-degree angle. A scarred pine tree could have been where the FX first stopped, police tell me, and could probably be where Franklin managed to get out before it crashed further.

The conditions of the area were close to inhospitable, dropping to single-digit Celsius temperatures in the evening to dawn. Franklin did have a jacket when he was found, but it was a thin running parka and he didn’t have it on. To sleep and as refuge from the rain, he called a makeshift waiting shed filled with fresh cow dung home for three days.

It also made sense why no one stopped to help him; there were no indicators on the road of the tragedy he just survived from. There were no barriers on that part of the highway where they fell. Because the ravine was along the route of the cousins, there were no skid marks to indicate that a car fell from the cliff-like highway.

Only the scarred pine tree, which to outsiders could be an indication of anything, offered a clue into the accident. The FX fell a kilometer deep; and with weeds and bushes around, no one could see the smashed FX from the road.

“Hindi mo makikitang nay nahulog, kasi walang palatandaan. Whereas kung may barriers, makikita mo kung nabangga siya o nasira siya,” Police Lieutenant Anselmo told me.

From the highway, there were no indications a tragedy occurred in this portion of the Kabayan-Bokod Road in Benguet. Photo courtesy: Kabayan Police

Police have already closed the investigation on the case; there was no one to sue. It was considered, in police parlance, a self-accident.

But the fallout from the tragedy continues to endure: Franklin is still grappling with the fact that his childhood friends, his cousins, are no longer with him. I asked him if there was anything he wanted to say to them, even just one that they could hear.

He gave me two minutes of silence and muffled tears, until he finally said: “Marami akong gustong sabihin, pero hindi ko alam.”

His sister Lourdes is particularly worried for his psychological health. “Hindi siya makapagsalita. 'Di mo maano ano talagang nangyari kasi siya lang ang nakakaalam,” Lourdes told me. “Sana matanggap niya at hindi niya sisihin ang sarili niya. Natatakot kami na posibleng ang hirap balikan. Mahirap kapag maaalala niya kasi mahirap iyon para sa kanya.”

Dr Miriam Lasegan, the medical director of Lutheran Hospital, has given Franklin a clean bill of health when he was allowed to go home on Friday.

But she gave the family a strong recommendation and referral for Franklin to receive psychological evaluation and therapy as soon as possible.

“Kailangan siyang i-refer sa higher psychological or psychiatric analysis,” Dr Lasegan said. “(Posibleng) kasama sa factors 'yung blunt force sa head niya, but of course psychologically posible rin. May binabanggit siya na parang may nag-salvage daw sa kanya at iniwan lang siya doon. Pakiramdam niya alone siya. Puwedeng kaya niya hindi matandaan kasi ayaw niyang maalala because of the trauma.”

After my interview with Franklin, he went out into the balcony of the hospital ward he is in. Carrying his bag of dextrose in one hand, his eyes looked out into the view of the mountain ranges of Benguet. In one of those ridges is the zigzag road where their FX fell.

He is far from that place now. But so are his eyes from where he is, gazing at the sun laced view of the range, as if looking for something that is there but he is struggling to find. —KG, GMA News