TACURONG CITY—It has been two years since the Lechonsito girls saw their mother. Cecile Lechonsito flew in on November seventh for her daughter Honey’s graduation. She took care of foreign children in Qatar while her husband Eduardo—called Nonie—held a job as licensing officer 3 for the Tacurong City government. The overseas work was necessary to pay for the tuition of two college girls. Sugar is 19, a hotel and restaurant management junior in Colegio del Sagrado Corazon de Jesus in Iloilo City. Honey is 23, a medical technology student at the Perpetual University in Laguna. When her mother came home, Sugar got her first laptop.

Sugar had not seen her father in the year she studied in Iloilo. For her, the holidays were to be a reunion with both parents.

On November 23, two weeks after that first hug between Cecile and Honey, she and Nonie stepped into a service vehicle, a Toyota Vios, driven by a Tacurong City Hall employee named Wilhelm Palabrica. Nonie, 53, had suffered a mild stroke days before, and Cecile has made arrangements to bring her husband to Cotabato City for a CT scan. With them were Mercy Palabrica, Wilhelm’s cousin, and Daryll de los Reyes. Both were also city hall employees.

On the road to Shariff Aquak, the red Vios with its cargo of five was stopped along with a convoy of vehicles from Buluan city.

Wilhelm and Mercy’s bodies were found on Tuesday, inside the mangled red Vios that the investigators dug out of a pit in a hill two kilometers from the main road.

On Wednesday afternoon, they found the mangled bodies of Nonie and Cecile. The two bodies had been buried under the Vios and a UNTV van.

The huge yellow hoe rips into the hill, pulling out cars and bodies, dumping them beside the pit. Crime scene investigators cover crushed faces and bloated torsos with newspapers. Fingerprints, hair samples, and then bodies are lifted onto bloodstained canvas stretchers and carried past the police line, to be lined up in rows on the dry grass. A volunteer covers them with palm leaves, until all that can be seen are sneakered feet, a bloody ear, a mangled hand outstretched. Fat black flies swoop over the corpses. Tacurong City employees, roaming the site in tears, identify Cecile and Nonie.

Eleven bodies were found that day. Daryll’s body was one of the last identified.

Cecile Lechonsito was fifty-one years old when she was murdered beside her husband that sunny Monday morning in November. On the day they found her body, she would have turned fifty-two.

Sugar and Honey can do little more than weep. At the wake, they do not mention the name of the Ampatuan clan. They are afraid. There is word that witnesses and families will be silenced.

The Lechonsito couple are only two of at least 57 victims of Monday’s massacre in Ampatuan, Maguindanao. Thirty have been identified from Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) lists as media workers by the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines. Although the DSWD claims to have identified most of the victims, at least one family, that of Reynaldo “Bebot” Momay from Midland Review, still claims there is no body. At the moment, four families are fighting to claim three unidentified victims. Investigators intend to resort to DNA testing to establish identities, a process that takes up to twenty days.

Sugar is petite, with straight black hair falling just beneath her shoulders. Honey keeps her hair in a ponytail, and holds her sister’s hand. They are quiet girls, soft-spoken. When an aunt tells them to say what they feel, it is Sugar, eyes still closed, still crying, who suddenly screams.

“I want to kill them, one by one, every family member of the people who murdered my mama and papa. I do not want a single one of them left alive. I want them to know how it feels.”

They wish they could hug their parents, but the bodies are too battered to hold.