When John Matthew Salilig suddenly disappeared on Feb. 18, his friends thought it was just typical Matt. The 24-year-old chemical engineering student was known to be careless with charging his phone, often letting the battery drain all the way down.
But by the next evening, panic started setting in.
The third-year student at Adamson University in the Philippines told his brother that he was going to attend the welcome rites of the Tau Gamma Phi fraternity on Feb. 18. He never made it out, and that was the last time anyone heard from him.
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“I don’t think he can forget to charge his phone [for such a] long time,” one of his friends told VICE World News. They requested anonymity, fearing harassment from strangers given the sensitivity of the case. “So that was the time when we got really worried about him.”
On Feb. 28, more than a week after Salilig’s family filed a missing person report, events took a dark turn. Salilig’s body was found buried in a shallow grave in Imus City, about an hour’s drive from his university.
By the time police uncovered Salilig’s body, led to the scene by a fraternity member who claimed to police he helped bury him, it had already started decomposing. However, there were visible injuries that indicated abuse, such as apparent bruising on his thighs, authorities reported.
Police found that Salilig had died from a grueling hazing ritual. But instead of immediately reporting his death, his fraternity brothers allegedly decided to hide his body to cover up what they had done.
An autopsy conducted the day the body was found revealed that Salilig died from “severe blunt force in the lower extremities.” His death has ignited another wave of attention on a longstanding problem of deadly student hazing rituals in the Philippines, which are especially prevalent in fraternities and military academies. Despite lawmakers’ efforts to curb the practice, hazing remains widely practiced in many fraternities across the country, affecting generations of young recruits.
Salilig’s brother, who identified the body for the police last week, broke down in tears. John Michael, another brother of Salilig who’s also a member of Tau Gamma Phi, said that he deeply regrets allowing Salilig to attend the welcome rites. He had thought that nothing bad would happen as he had been through the hazing himself.
“Even if I tried to stop him that time, I knew he would still attend [the rite],” he said. “So [in the name of] brotherhood, I said, ‘Go ahead, see you on Sunday.’”
While students at Adamson University attended mass and a candlelight vigil for Salilig, his death sparked a flurry of condemnation from politicians, many who are now calling for further protection on top of existing provisions that criminalize violent hazing practices.
In a statement issued on March 1, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. promised that “justice will be served.”
“It is not through violence that we can measure the strength of our brotherhood,” the statement read.
Meanwhile, Senator Jinggoy Estrada said that Salilig’s case “proves that perpetrators of this crime are unperturbed by the existence of the Anti-Hazing Law.” The Anti-Hazing Act of 1995 prohibited physical violence at initiation rites and was introduced four years after the death of Leonardo Villa, a first-year law student who suffered a cardiac arrest after being attacked at a hazing session. Under the 1995 law, those found guilty of causing death at these ceremonies could be sentenced to life imprisonment.
But the landmark legislation turned out to be far from a panacea for hazing violence. Only one conviction was made in about 20 years after the introduction of the law. During this time, hazing killed at least a dozen people in the Philippines.
In 2018, the law was amended to outlaw the practice of hazing entirely. This came after the death of Horacio Castillo III, a freshman law student who allegedly died from injuries he sustained in a violent ritual in September 2017. In criminal proceedings against 10 fraternity members accused of involvement in Castillo’s death, a witness told the court that the victim was made to do humiliating acts, including stripping naked, while being punched and hit with wooden paddles until he collapsed. He was declared dead on arrival at the hospital, covered in bruises, cigarette burns, and candle wax drippings. Criminal proceedings against the fraternity members are ongoing.
Hazing-related deaths are also prevalent in cadet schools, experts say. In 2019, Philippine Military Academy cadet Darwin Dormitorio lost his life after being beaten by upperclassmen who also electrocuted his genitals using a taser flashlight.
Shortly after Dormitorio’s death, then-Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte—himself a frat member as a law student—said that eliminating hazing would not be possible without banning fraternities, calling the practice “permanent insanity.”
In a statement on Feb. 28 confirming Salilig’s death, Adamson University said that they were conducting their own investigation into the case. Meanwhile, the police have identified at least 18 persons of interest in Salilig’s hazing.
Police said on Friday that one of the persons of interest had died by suicide on Feb. 28, the same day that Salilig’s body was discovered. The police did not share more details about the person’s identity but said that he had allegedly driven one of the vehicles used during the hazing.
Roi dela Cruz, a fraternity member who attended the rites with Salilig told local news agency GMA that they were hit repeatedly with a wooden paddle, some up to 70 times—a common practice in hazing rituals. “I thought of quitting after 20 paddles because I could die,” he said.
On Tuesday, Dela Cruz testified during a public inquiry into Salilig’s death that he saw Salilig having a seizure after the hazing ritual. When he asked the others to take Salilig to hospital, they rejected the suggestion and got upset at him, he said in front of a panel of senators.
At the same hearing, the leader of the fraternity chapter, who also served as the master initiator at the rites, admitted that he was among those who buried Salilig.
Salilig is at least the 10th student to die from hazing since 2020. But there may be more.
Across the country in Cebu city, 20-year-old Ronnel Baguio also allegedly died from a hazing ritual organized by another chapter of Tau Gamma Phi, his mother told reporters at a press conference last week, coming forward after news broke of Salilig’s death. A week after Baguio was hazed on Dec. 10, he informed his mother that he had been vomiting blood. When his mother flew to Cebu the next day, she was greeted by his lifeless body in hospital.
“His legs were full of wounds,” she said.
In response to Salilig’s death, Tau Gamma Phi released a statement on March 1 .
“There are no words strong enough to express our disgust and condemnation at the senseless acts that led to the untimely death of [Salilig],” the statement said. “Toward that end, we reiterate our commitment to non-violence and the observance of the law, most specifically, the Anti-Hazing Law of 2018.”
But Louie Blake Saile Sarmiento, a lawyer who researches hazing rituals in the Philippines, told VICE World News that the enforcement of safety measures across multiple chapters of the same fraternity remains challenging.
“The fraternity system is more like a franchise,” Sarmiento said, who is a member of several fraternities himself. “So that’s why it’s also hard to control from top to bottom because each chapter has a certain level of independence and autonomy.”
Salilig’s body arrived at his hometown of Zamboanga on March 2, surrounded by grieving family and loved ones. The anonymous friend who spoke to VICE World News was also in attendance, still reeling from the realization that Salilig was gone.
“That morning I cried. I cried until I had no tears left,” they said. “Until now it’s really heavy and painful that this happened.”
In a photo that has come to represent one of their fondest memories of Salilig, he beams with a cheesecake in his hands during his birthday party in December. Friends around him hold comically large candles, after failing to secure proper birthday candles for the celebration.
“The candles that we lit were the big candles that we had in our house: so I said, ‘Matt, sorry, this is all we have,” his friend recalled. “He still blew out the big candles.”
“It’s sad because that was the same candle we used at his [funeral].”
