FIVE YEARS after visual artist Breanna Patricia “Bree” Jonson died in La Union, her family is renewing its call for the National Bureau of Investigation to render and provide a final report on the investigation it undertook in 2021.
Jonson died on Sept. 18, after she was found unresponsive in a room at a resort in San Juan, La Union, where she had been staying with her then-boyfriend, Julian Ongpin, son of businessman Roberto Ongpin. Ongpin said he found Jonson hanging in the bathroom. The circumstances surrounding her death have remained the subject of questions and calls from her family for a thorough and impartial investigation.
The NBI opened an independent investigation in 2021, and material pieces of evidence connected to the case were placed under its custody. The family and its legal team say that despite several follow-ups over the past five years, the NBI has not rendered a final investigative report or provided the family a clear accounting of the investigation’s conclusions.
For Bree’s mother, Salome Jonson, the wait has required repeated trips home from Canada, where she is based as an overseas Filipino worker, to pursue updates in Manila and Davao. She said the family has repeatedly been referred to other offices, asked to return or follow up again, and left without the final report it has long sought.
In May 2026, the family’s lawyers again wrote senior NBI officials seeking executive intervention, an urgent status review, reconstitution of the investigative team, and renewed forensic examination of CCTV/DVR evidence. The requests reflected the family’s growing frustration over an investigation that, nearly five years after it began, had still not produced a final report for them.
The prolonged delay has also led the family to raise a difficult concern: whether the high-profile background of a person who may be implicated in the case has influenced, directly or indirectly, the pace of the investigation. The family stressed that this is a concern arising from the extraordinary length of the delay, not a conclusion about anyone’s culpability.
The family also said it is troubled by what it sees as a disparity in the speed with which some high-profile or politically urgent matters can receive institutional attention while Bree’s case has remained unresolved for five years. It is asking the NBI to explain how cases are prioritized and to demonstrate that the same standards of urgency and diligence apply regardless of who is involved.
“We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for equal treatment —the same urgency, diligence, and commitment that should be afforded to every case, regardless of who is involved or how much political pressure surrounds it,” the family statement said.
As the fifth anniversary of Bree’s death approaches, the family is calling on the NBI to provide a clear and substantive status update, state whether the investigation has been completed, account for the evidence placed in its custody, and provide the long-awaited final report — or explain what investigative work remains and why it has taken five years.
For the Jonson family, the appeal is ultimately about transparency, accountability, and equal access to justice. After five years of waiting, they say those obligations can no longer be deferred.
