Mary Jane Veloso excited to wear her funeral dress for Mother’s Day

By: 10 years ago

Mary Jane Veloso. Photo from The Jakarta Post/Asia News Network

Mary Jane Veloso with her cheerfulness and endless joking was like sunshine streaming into the gloom that blanketed the prison island where she and eight other foreigners awaited their execution for drug trafficking at midnight of April 28.

By all accounts, Mary Jane, a 30-year-old mother of two, seemed to have peacefully accepted her fate, to die before an Indonesian firing squad on Nusakambangan Island, off Central Java.

The reversal of fortune on April 28, the reprieve that came five minutes before the scheduled execution, has made Mary Jane’s spirits even higher and her strength more contagious, according to her family.

Stories of hope

Now she can even find excitement in looking for an occasion to wear the plain white dress that she would have worn to her funeral had the execution taken place.

“She finds the dress so beautiful. She told us she would wear it when she plays the role of an angel in the Mothers’ Day celebration (at the prison),” said Maritess Veloso-Laurente, Mary Jane’s older sister.

The Velosos, the parents Celia and Cesar, and sister Laurente, met with Inquirer editors and reporters on Thursday night, accompanied by their lawyers, to recount not just the gloom and despair that awaited them in Indonesia but their stories of hope.

Brave young mother

According to Laurente, Mary Jane’s was a story of a brave, young mother who went overseas at the age of 25 because hunger and poverty were, to her, an even more frightening prospect for her two young children, Mark Daniel, now 12, and Mark Darren, now 6.

“It would be awful if my children went hungry,” Laurente quoted Mary Jane as saying back in April 2010 before she flew to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with her recruiter Maria Cristina Sergio.

On April 22, 2010, Mary Jane was arrested at Yogyakarta airport in Indonesia after 2.6 kilograms of heroin was discovered in her luggage. She was sentenced to die on Oct. 10, 2010.

But even in the face of death, Mary Jane showed her family the same courage she had when she left the country to find work as a domestic helper.

Laughing so hard

Laurente recounted the days before the execution when Mary Jane would exchange jokes and banter with her loved ones on Nusakambangan, which the world now knows as Indonesia’s execution island.

Mary Jane poked fun at her brother, Christopher, and Michael Candelaria, her ex-husband and father of her children, who had taken their first-ever plane ride to see her before her execution.

“What did you do on the plane. Did you make a mess?” Mary Jane asked them.

Candelaria related how he didn’t know where to put his food and drinks on the plane. He said he made a complaint about what he thought was dessert packed like a “jelly ace” for being so bland, but later found that it was just plain water.

Candelaria had joined the family—Mary Jane’s parents Celia and Cesar, her siblings Laurente and Darling, and her two children—two days before the April 28 execution date.

They were “laughing so hard” they forgot how close Mary Jane’s death was, Laurente said.

“It was because of Mary Jane. She would not want us to cry,” she said.

Last image

On the final day, however, the family broke down when they were separated from Mary Jane as the latter was being taken to the place of execution.

But their last image of Mary Jane was a happy one, Laurente said.

“She was standing before the closing gate looking at us, smiling. That smile on the poster, that was the smile she left us there,” Laurente said.

Five minutes before 12:25 a.m., Mary Jane thought she would be joining the eight others sentenced to die for drug smuggling.

Spiritual strength

“See you in heaven,” was Mary Jane’s last words to the death-row inmates passing by her, according to Laurente.

Laurente admires her sister’s display of strength, attributing it to her religiosity even when they were children.

“She was the one who would always ask us to pray during meals. We always assign someone in the family to lead the prayers,” she said.

Since 2011, Mary Jane has been seeking spiritual advice from German Jesuit Fr. Bernhard Kieser, she said.

It had been agreed that Kieser would be with Mary Jane during her final moments.

Lost in translation

The moments just before the execution were so depressing, but not without humor for Laurente, particularly when an Indonesian official could not communicate to her Mary Jane’s reprieve.

“Before the shots were fired, one Indonesian official started speaking to me in Bahasa. I told him I could not understand,” Laurente said.

The Indonesian official who was lost in translation simply told her to “Be strong.”

From the island’s wharf where families of the death row inmates were gathered under a tent embellished with flowers and an abundance of food, Laurente heard a burst of gunfire.

She wailed and shouted, “Bunso, Mary Jane!” She was inconsolable for 25 minutes until she found out that Mary Jane was not among those executed from the TV news reports.

“I realized that was what the Indonesian official was trying to tell me,” Laurente said.

Not over yet

While the Veloso family felt happy that Mary Jane was saved from execution and was now able to sleep at night, anything could still happen, Laurente said.

But Edre Olalia, secretary general of the National Union of People’s Lawyers and one of the private counsels of Mary Jane, said the case against Mary Jane’s recruiter, Sergio, was strong.

“The mere fact that the Indonesian government took a second look is something extraordinary. It is incumbent for [Philippine] authorities to not let this chance go to waste,” Olalia said.