This was way out of the usual for Yap, FSM Consul General Teresa Filepin said in reaction to the death of Yap’s acting attorney general, Rachelle Bergeron, who was shot in the small Micronesian State.
Bergeron and her dog were shot on Monday night after returning from a daily run. The FSM consul general lives in the same quiet neighborhood as the late acting attorney general — in a nation where owning a personal handgun is illegal. Speaking candidly, Filepin shared how the incident has impacted her community.
“Yap has a population of 11,000 community members, very close-knitted. And when something like this happens, it is like something out of the television. Though I can’t speak in an official capacity, to what had happened — or the investigation or anything like that, it hit close to home because the village that she lives in is my village,” Filepin said.
She added: “They did not know that there were gunshots — the neighborhood. They heard the three gunshots. I was talking to her closest neighbor, who is a senator in the Yap state legislature, and even he did not know that what they heard were gunshots. That’s how small and how naive the community is when it comes to this degree of violence.”
The local and federal investigation on the shooting death is still ongoing. So far, no suspects have been named.
##
