Yesterday afternoon, at the Arlington funeral home where the wake of Rene Clert “Bobet” Baterbonia was being prepared, his mother Rovelyn could be heard screaming and crying in anguish after meeting with representatives of Ateneo de Manila University. The reporters waiting outside for a statement were told that the representatives had already left, and that they were not yet ready to face the press.
Hold those two images beside each other. A mother from Agusan del Sur, weeping out loud in a Manila funeral home, and an institution that cannot yet bring itself to stand in front of the cameras. In crisis communication terms, that single afternoon may be the most damaging hour Ateneo has had since this began, because the grief is public, raw, and unforgettable, while the institution remains physically and emotionally hard to see.
So please extend help to Ateneo.
Not the kind of help that reflexively defends it, but the kind that is honest enough to say what many of its own people are surely already thinking: the university is losing the public narrative on whether it practices what it preaches as a Jesuit institution in the way it is handling the drowning of two of its basketball players. That matters not only because two young men died under its watch, but because Ateneo’s identity is built on words it teaches students, alumni, and professionals to live by, words like integrity, honesty, accountability, and cura personalis, the care for the whole person.
I say this as someone who took my MBA units at Ateneo’s Makati campus. I sat in classrooms where we were reminded, again and again, that we were being formed as “men and women for others,” and that leadership is tested not when things are easy but when things go wrong. That is why the gap between those ideals and what the public has seen this week feels so stark.
This story also lands with a force the usual political noise never quite reaches. It cuts deeper than the Senate dramas, the Sara Duterte impeachment trial, or — the one I’m obsessed with now — the war between the Lopez cousins. And it carries an intimacy closer to the devastation of a Mindanao earthquake, except that this time the epicenter is one 19-year-old boy and the people who loved him.
The boy from Talacogon
Rene came from Talacogon in Agusan del Sur, a municipality in Eastern Mindanao island where the official poverty incidence stands at 42.78%. His parents sold fish in the local market to raise seven children. The social welfare department described him as a former 4Ps beneficiary, one of the many children of poverty-reduction households who try to convert school, talent, and discipline into a way out. Whenever he earned money from basketball tournaments, those same accounts say, he would send around 80% of it home to his parents and siblings.
And he was good. A 6-foot-3 forward, the 2025 Palarong Pambansa basketball Most Valuable Player, the standout of Davao Region’s championship run, and by many accounts a generous and hardworking young athlete whose talent had opened the door to his biggest dream, a slot as an incoming Blue Eagle. Sportswriters reach for the word Cinderella when they tell stories like his, although the phrase makes the climb sound easier and more romantic than it was. He arrived in Manila without a famous surname, a powerful backer, or a rich family network, carrying only years of work, skill, discipline, and love for his family. He was 19 years old, leaving one of the poorest corners of the country for imperial Manila and one of its most elite schools.
On the afternoon of June 8, 2026, during a team-building activity in Dipaculao, Aurora, Rene and his fellow student-athlete Chukwuemeka “Divine” Adili drowned.
But this piece is not only about Rene. It is also, and perhaps more urgently, about Ateneo, and about how an institution speaks when something terrible happens under its care.
Crisis communication 101 when people die
Death-related crises are not new, and institutions as different as airlines, shipping lines, TV networks, and real estate developers have all learned, sometimes at terrible cost, that the public judges not only the tragedy itself but the humanity of the response. The rules are simple enough to remember even when the facts are still incomplete.
- Families come first. Next of kin are told personally, compassionately, and thoroughly, before or at least in step with any public announcement.
- Verify and disclose. Fact as shared quickly but only to the extent that they are verified, with a clear line drawn between what is known, what remains unclear, and what is under investigation.
- Visible leadership. A leader with moral authority, not just a legal office or a social media account, stands before the public as the official spokesperson for the institution. That public face is the one who publicly absorbs anger, answers questions, and shows empathy.
- Operational empathy. Words are matched by concrete support, from travel and funeral assistance to counseling and a liaison who does not disappear after the first call.
- Accountability over exposure. And once the cameras go away, the institution comes back with findings, accountability, and reform.
These principles are easier to grasp when placed beside real crises. We have seen these rules followed, and broken, in our own backyard.
What other crises looked like in the first three days
Across these cases, the pattern is clear. Day 1 is for truth-telling and human presence. Days 2 and 3 are for deeper explanation, visible support, and a leader who can look people in the eye and say, here is what is known, here is what went wrong, and here is what will happen next.
What Ateneo has done since June 8
The drowning happened on the afternoon of June 8, 2026. Today is June 11, which makes this effectively Day 3 of the public crisis.
On Day 1, Ateneo confirmed the deaths of Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili through an official statement posted on its website and carried on its social media channels, expressing sorrow, extending condolences, and asking for prayers and privacy for the families and the Ateneo community, while police in Aurora began telling reporters that the incident appeared to be an accidental drowning caused by strong currents.
On Day 2, the university published an update saying it was “working closely with the families of Divine and Rene,” coordinating with authorities, assisting with autopsy and funeral arrangements, and providing psychosocial support to teammates and the community. That same day, however, Rene’s mother was already describing a very different emotional reality. She said she learned of her son’s death through a Messenger call, and that the explanations given to her remained lacking. “Kulang,” she described. Had she known the kind of risky activity involved, she said, she would not have let her son go, even if the family stayed poor.
By Day 3, the conversation had widened from grief into accountability. Details such as warnings about sea conditions, and claims that the team had moved away from the supervised front area of the resort, reached the public through police briefings and media reports rather than from Ateneo itself. The university, for its part, announced wake and Mass arrangements for Rene on campus and continued to stress coordination and mourning. And then came Arlington, the screaming heard through the funeral home, and the representatives who left before the press could ask a single question.
Then, before the day ended, came the most substantive communication so far — and the first to carry a human name. In a memo to the community signed by University President Fr Roberto Yap, SJ, the university gave its first detailed account of the incident, saying the team had been doing a conditioning exercise in knee-deep water near the shoreline when massive waves and a powerful rip current suddenly engulfed them, that most of the players fought their way back, and that Rene and Divine were pulled away. The memo stated categorically that “no weights of any kind were used” in the exercise, announced a fact-finding inquiry mandated by the Board of Trustees, and promised that the inquiry would reconstruct a transparent timeline, review all athletic protocols, interview every individual present, and submit its independent findings to the Board for swift structural action. The Jesuit university disclosed that head coach Tab Baldwin and team manager Epok Quimpo had gone on leave for the duration, a move the memo framed not as accountability but as protection for the inquiry itself, so that everyone involved could cooperate freely, without actual or perceived pressure.
Not long after, it said in a separate statement, also signed by Fr Yap, clarified that Baldwin’s silence since the tragedy had been at the university’s own request, made so that official processes could proceed and the facts could be established before any public discussion. Read as crisis communication, the two statements are the closest Ateneo has come to following the playbook. There is finally a named leader, a first official account of what happened, a categorical denial of the most damaging circulating allegation, an independent inquiry with a defined scope, and visible consequences in the form of leaves.
Read more closely, they also show how much ground had already been lost. The account arrived on Day 3, after the police and the media had spent two days shaping the narrative, and both documents are signed papers rather than a person standing before the families and the press, absorbing questions in real time. The memo speaks in absolutes, truth and accountability both rendered absolute, the responsibility to the families rendered sacred, language that will either be vindicated by what follows or remembered against it.
The framing of the leaves cuts both ways too, because protecting the integrity of an inquiry is the procedurally correct move, and it is also a sentence built to be quoted later if the findings clear the men now on leave. The Baldwin statement, for its part, exists only because the silence it explains had already curdled into a story of its own.
Why the response feels cold
This is where the communications problem becomes a values problem. Ateneo has not been silent. It has issued statements, announced liturgical observances, coordinated with authorities, and said it is working with the families, and on paper all of that is proper, even textbook.
What people are reacting to is the absence of a recognizably human center. Until this afternoon, no named leader had attached himself to the response at all, and even now, with the president’s signature on two statements, there is no visible leader calmly taking daily questions, holding the parents’ hands in public, absorbing the anger, and saying plainly that someone’s son died under the university’s care. There is no one who seems to stand between the grieving family and the machinery of institutional self-protection.
A signature is a beginning. It is not a presence.
That absence matters because public trust is emotional before it is analytical. A grieving mother from Agusan del Sur saying the explanations are “kulang” will always carry more weight than a carefully drafted statement saying the university is coordinating with the family. A mother saying she was never properly oriented about the risks of the activity will always carry more moral authority than a campus post asking for prayers.
So the response reads as cold, measured, and very corporate, all polished language and controlled emphasis on coordination, process, privacy, and institutional support. Yes, Ateneo must cooperate with investigators, and yes, a case like this will always carry legal implications. But the moral fact is larger than the legal one. Two young men died. If there were lapses, the public wants to hear that the university is prepared to take responsibility where it failed, not simply to manage its exposure.
Part of the anger comes from Ateneo’s choices. Part of it comes from who Rene was and where he came from.
Rene is everyone else.
The imperial Manila problem
The class dimension of this tragedy is impossible to ignore, because Rene’s story was never only about sport. It was about social mobility, geography, and power, about a boy converting talent and discipline into a way out of a town where nearly half the population lives in poverty, and about an arrangement in which the country’s elite institutions draw their brightest recruits from its poorest corners.
When something goes wrong in that arrangement, when the institution on the hill sounds restrained while the mother from Agusan del Sur sounds abandoned, the imbalance does the storytelling on its own. This is no longer just a drowning. It now carries the charge of probinsya versus imperial Manila, poor family versus elite school, lofty values versus lived behavior, and Rene becomes not one athlete but a symbol of every son and daughter who enters an elite institution hoping that talent and discipline can change a family’s fate.
What helping Ateneo really means
So when I say please extend help to Ateneo, I do not mean shielding it from scrutiny. I mean pushing it to practice what it preaches, to live up to the standards it teaches. Helping Ateneo, in this case, means insisting that it place the families first, explain what decisions were made and by whom, clarify what safety protocols existed, and show what will change in how its student-athletes are trained and supervised.
The fact-finding inquiry announced on Day 3 is a real step, and on paper it is the right one. The test now is what follows it: whether the findings are published rather than filed, whether the timeline it promises to reconstruct is shared with the public and not just the Board, and whether someone stands before Rovelyn and the press to deliver it in person.
It also means asking for a different kind of leadership in public, because statements and liturgies and coordination language are not enough on their own. What is needed is a calm, credible, compassionate human face, someone willing to absorb grief instead of routing it through official channels. The strongest institutions understand that in a death-related crisis, empathy is not ornamental. It is operational.
If Ateneo is truly Ateneo, the test is not how beautifully it mourns. The test is how bravely it tells the truth to a mother from Agusan del Sur whose son died on its watch.
Lala Rimando 
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