Two teenagers drowned during an Ateneo team-building activity on June 8, 2026. One became something close to a cultural phenomenon; the other became a footnote. Rene Baterbonia‘s death was real and devastating, and so was his family’s grief. But somewhere between the tragedy and now, the late 19-year-old basketball player’s memory has become something much bigger: merchandise, a physical store, a mini museum with an entrance fee, a life-size sculpture, and even a movie in development. While Rene’s family built an industry, Divine Adili’s family privately mourned their son’s passing. And beneath it all is an even more important question: Have we become so invested in the spectacle surrounding Rene Baterbonia that we’ve lost sight of what happened to him in the first place?

A tragedy weaponized

Shortly after news of Rene’s untimely demise during an Ateneo team-building event, online conversations stopped being about shock and tragedy and started being about taking sides. The discourse quickly expanded into Manila versus the provinces, “Imperial Manila” versus provincial sacrifice. It even turned political, as celebrities and politicians visited Rene’s wake and continued talking about him after his death.

What should have been a conversation about two young athletes dying during a university activity became entangled with regional resentment, politics, and online tribalism. And once grief becomes something competing groups can claim as their own, the person at the center of it risks disappearing behind everything people want him to represent.

A tragedy that slowly became something you could buy

Nearly four months after the tragedy, Rene’s name has been immortalized to high heaven. First came the merch — notebooks, shirts, pins, stickers. Baterbonia’s Collection, Rene’s “official store page” managed by his mother, Rovelyn Baterbonia, now has 413K followers as of writing. Rovelyn herself has amassed 1.7 million followers on her personal account. She recently opened a mini museum beyond Baterbonia’s Collection, although it drew the ire of Filipinos online when they questioned the PHP 30 entrance fee for non-residents of Talacogon.

But there’s more. There’s the covered court named after him at Ateneo de Davao University, a life-size sculpture with real hair donated by Rene’s supporters, and ongoing plans for a movie supported by Senator Robin Padilla. A “fan” who recently visited Rene’s grave even likened him to Jesus: “Para siyang si Jesus, nagpakamatay siya para sa kaibigan.”

Individually, these can all be understood as acts of remembrance. Taken together, however, they create something stranger: Rene is no longer simply being remembered. His image has become something people can wear, collect, visit, photograph, watch, and buy.

True, grief does not have to look a certain way. Rene’s family is entitled to remember their son however they choose. But the public is also allowed to ask what happens when mourning develops a commercial infrastructure around it. At what point does memorializing a person turn that person into a brand?

We conveniently forget it wasn’t just Rene who suffered this tragedy

There’s another person who tends to disappear whenever the story of June 8 is retold. Divine Adili died the same way, in the same place, at the same time. He was 21 and already playing for Ateneo. But his family grieved privately while Rene was built into something far bigger, revered for the very same tragedy that Adili perished in. Nobody talks about Divine now, or creates a museum just for his memories. There’s no Divine merch, movie, or statue. There’s just silence. And that silence tells you everything about how selective the mourning actually is.

The spectacle risks drowning out the actual fight for accountability

In the middle of all this hullabaloo, the public has seemingly forgotten the point. Online, there’s endless talk about Rene Baterbonia—the basketball player he would have become, the dreams he had, the potential that was cut short. “Justice for Rene” was initially a cry for authorities to investigate his university’s negligence and institutional failure that led to the tragedy in the first place. But now “Justice for Rene” has become a slogan, a hashtag you just use online. Actual justice got buried under all the noise and the “boring” stuff—institutional accountability, systemic change at Ateneo, a real investigation into what went wrong—and was swept under the rug.

Even if the investigation ended here, there should have been a more concerted effort toward lasting change than just another moneymaking scheme.

A museum can preserve memories, but it can’t replace accountability

Look, there is nothing inherently wrong with a museum dedicated to someone you love. For Rene’s family and supporters, seeing his jerseys, belongings, photographs, and memories gathered in one place may genuinely offer comfort. Visitors may sincerely feel that paying their respects there is a way of keeping his memory alive.

But one can’t help thinking that every time someone bought merch or visited the museum thinking they were honoring him, they were actually participating in the erasure of what mattered. Remembrance and accountability aren’t interchangeable.

If the public truly wants to honor Rene and Divine, then attention shouldn’t end with buying something bearing Rene’s face or visiting a place dedicated to him. It should extend to following the investigation, asking what safeguards universities have in place for student-athletes, reforming team-building activities, and demanding that whatever failures contributed to this tragedy aren’t repeated.

Rene deserved to remain a person, not become a product

Rene deserved to graduate. He deserved to play college basketball. He deserved the chance to succeed, fail, change his mind, grow older, and become whoever he was actually going to become. He deserved an investigation into what actually happened, not a mythology about who he could have been. He deserved to be a person, not a symbol.

He deserved better than to become the saint we needed him to be so we could feel like we were part of something righteous. That’s what we actually owe him. Not a museum, or merch, or movies. That’s what both Rene and Divine deserve: just the truth about what happened and the commitment to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Check us out on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and YouTube, to be the first to know about the latest news and coolest trends!