It took time for the vigilantes to develop more efficient methods for murder. Mistakes were made along the way. They accidentally shot a 12-year-old. They mistook a man wearing the same color shirt for their target and murdered him instead. They occasionally panicked, resulting in the odd situation of an armed target finding an entire posse of killers bunched into a cramped knot at the mouth of a narrow alley.



“I told them that’s how we would get screwed,” said CSG Tondo Chapter 2 member Simon. “If anyone blasted at us then we’d all be dead. So I said, ‘We go corner by corner. One man at every corner. Let the enemy run, and we rip into him wherever he goes.’ That’s how we got Sitoy.”



By then, it was seven months into the drug war. The target, Sitoy, was one of Toyo’s hitmen, a short, cocky meth addict who liked to hang a pair of grenades on a string around his neck.



Sources told Rappler that Sitoy was so dangerous he sometimes forgot one of his grenades in the canteen where he ate. They said he dealt meth when he had the money and scored drugs with the barrel of his loaded shotgun when he was broke.



Simon said the kill was “on the orders of the police."



A team was selected, surveillance initiated, the time and place set. There were six, possibly seven, killers who gathered late in the evening of January 31, 2017.



They took up their posts along the row of tenements. They waited in the dark. The mosquitoes were biting. Nobody moved until an hour past midnight, when Sitoy walked out into the open.



The vigilantes began firing.



“We shot him in the ass,” said Simon. “So he couldn’t run. And then he went for his grenade. The pin was taped down and he was ripping it off. So we shot him again.”



Sitoy dropped to the ground, bleeding from a chest wound. “When he cried, I felt bad for him,” Simon said. “He was begging, 'Don't, don't!'" (Commander Maning, asked about Sitoy's death, told Rappler to "ask the police." )



Simon said they shot Sitoy at least six times: once from the back, once on the arm, once in the chest, and three times through the skull.



The vigilantes called the police. The cops came in with a bomb squad. The CSG went home.