VANCOUVER, B.C. — Just as Devin Cabanilla’s family left the festival celebrating Filipino heritage Saturday in South Vancouver, a man driving a black Audi SUV accelerated toward the crowd.
Around 8 p.m., the Audi plowed into a mass of hundreds of people in an enclosed area — a back street blocked off for food trucks — killing 11 people at the Lapu Lapu Day Festival. The deceased ranged in age from 5 to 65. Names of the victims have not been released.
The tragedy has shattered a sense of safety for Cabanilla and dozens of other parents and dancers from Seattle’s Kalahi Philippine Dance Company, who traveled north to perform traditional Filipino dances at the festival grounds, a school at Fraser Street and East 41st Avenue.
“The amount of kids and elderly people there was extremely high,” Cabanilla said. “And (how) jarring to think how many people who were around me might be gone.”
Vancouver interim police Chief Steve Rai said at a news conference Sunday that dozens were injured, some seriously, and that the number of dead could rise in the coming days or weeks.
“It is the darkest day in Vancouver’s history,” Rai said.
Police arrested Vancouver man Kai-Ji Adam Lo, 30, at the scene, who has been charged with eight counts of second degree murder.
Canadian authorities swiftly ruled out terrorism, saying the suspect has a “a significant history of interactions with police and health care professionals related to mental health.”
At first, Cabanilla was oblivious to the attack. His family didn’t know what happened until they got a call later from another dance troupe member.
All of the kids in the Seattle troupe were safe and accounted for.
Video of the aftermath shows the dead and injured along a narrow street. The front of the driver’s SUV was mangled.
Kris Pangilinan, who brought his pop-up clothing and lifestyle booth to the festival, told The Associated Press he saw the vehicle enter past the barricade slowly, before the driver slammed on the gas in an area that was packed with people after a concert. Pangilinan said hearing the sounds of bodies hitting the vehicle will never leave his mind.
“He sideswiped someone on his right side and I was like, ‘Oh, yo yo.’ And then he slammed on the gas,” he said. “And the sound of the acceleration, it sounds like an F1 car about to start a race.
“He slammed on the gas, barreled through the crowd. And all I can remember is seeing bodies flying up in the air higher than the food trucks themselves and landing on the ground and people yelling and screaming. It looked like a bowling ball hitting bowling pins and all the pins are flying into the air.”
Pangilinan said that it would be hard to believe “that someone has some malice against the Filipino people.”
The attack rattled Canada on the eve of a federal election Monday.
Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim said in a news conference Sunday he would continue pushing for mandatory care, referred to as involuntary treatment in the United States, a controversial intervention that requires someone to receive mental health or substance use treatment without their consent.
“We have people on the streets who cannot direct their own care, and they’re causing harm to themselves and other people,” Sim said.
Athena Bautista, whose daughter and boyfriend performed with Kalahi, the dance group from Seattle, said she and her family attended the outdoor concert, enjoying the grassy field and pleasant weather.
After the music ended around 8 p.m., Bautista and her family waved goodbye to other parents and walked toward their Airbnb. She popped into a store and was alarmed when she could see out the window “an unusual amount of police cars and ambulances passing us toward the direction we just came from.”
“We just had a bad feeling,” she said. “It felt like it was a stream of police and ambulances and fire trucks, and I feel like we kept hearing them for the next hour after we got back to our Airbnb.”
Bautista quickly started calling other Seattle families attending the event to confirm their safety, while notifying her friends back home that her family was safe.
“I cried some last night, just thinking about it,” she said Sunday. “We were pretty distraught, we couldn’t sleep, and we couldn’t tell our kids what happened because we didn’t want to ruin the great day they just had.”
“We feel like our communities are in mourning,” she added. “It’s a horrible feeling.”
Saadiah Muhamad and Mohamed Sariman, owners of Malaysian food truck Kampong, were parked along the blocked street. Around 8 p.m., the couple and their kids were winding down for the night, getting ready to leave.
Sariman went out to use the bathroom. Moments after he stepped back into his food truck, he heard an explosion of noise. He looked outside the window of his truck and saw a body. He told his kids and his wife not to look outside, but it was too late.
“They were crying, she was crying, we were all crying,” he said in an interview.
Sariman couldn’t sleep at all Saturday night.
“You heard about the news all the time,” he said. “You really never imagined if you’re involved in this kind of thing.”
They tried to help direct medics to injured people.
“It was so bad,” he said. “You’re sick to the stomach.
High school students Rocket Butler, 18, Ezra Duifhuis, 17, and Nathaniel Fast, 15, went to the festival together.
“It was terrible to see,” said Duifhuis, who lives in the neighborhood. He ran home for a moment, and when he returned, “there’s just people everywhere, blood on the pavement, bloody kids being carried to the ambulance, people screaming.”
Fast was heading over to the event with his dad when he heard an ambulance whip past. He thought that someone had a heart attack at first. It was the first time Fast had seen a dead person.
Kenneth John Leo, 27, and Kenn Ramos, 31, two Canadian survivors of the Saturday night attack, had taken videos of themselves and their friends celebrating at the concert before the attack.
“We didn’t know that tragedy would strike us in a few moments,” Leo said.
They were standing on the street when they heard strange bumping noises and saw a car approaching rapidly. Out of instinct, they rushed into the gap between two food trucks, pulling others with them.
Jennifer Wolf, 58, lives on East 43rd Avenue, a block away. She didn’t attend the event, but heard it from her home.
“It’s all just very scary,” she said. “You would have never expected something like this to happen in our city, in our neighborhood, and now it’s literally in our backyard.”
Jasmin Matias cried as she carried a bouquet of flowers to lay at the scene Sunday. She thought about the 11 victims all day.
It was “senseless,” she said. “They did not get the chance to live.”
She wondered why the attacker was able to drive if he had previous run-ins with the law.
“He was known to the police,” she said. “Why didn’t they take his driver’s license?”
Juliet Cheatle, choreographer for the Kalahi Philippine Dance Company, said about 32 people from the Seattle group attended the festival, including dancers and their parents.
Cheatle said a few members of her dance group stayed into the evening to see the concert. When she heard sirens from her Airbnb around 8 p.m., she contacted everyone to make sure no one was still there.
“Some of them missed it by minutes before the incident happened,” Cheatle said. “It was just like, I feel blessed. We’re so very blessed that we are all safe.”
She said she feels scared, frustrated and sad. But when members of her group ask her whether they will attend the Lapu Lapu festival if there is one next year, she says there is no doubt in her mind they would return.
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said he reached out to Vancouver’s mayor to offer support.
“I speak for all Seattleites when I express that our hearts are with the victims, survivors, and all those affected by the appalling vehicle attack in Vancouver, British Columbia,” Harrell said in a statement Sunday.
Saturday’s festival was in honor of Datu Lapu Lapu, an Indigenous chieftain of Mactan, an island now part of the Philippines, who defeated Spanish forces led by the explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1521. He became regarded as the first Filipino national hero, a symbol of Native resistance, Filipino resilience and the struggle against colonialism.
British Columbia officially recognized April 27 as Lapu-Lapu Day in 2023, celebrating the contributions of the Filipino community in the province. Saturday was the second year the Filipino community in Vancouver organized the Lapu Lapu Day Block Party, which featured a parade, dance groups, and a concert by some members of the Black Eyed Peas.
A day meant for fellowship and belonging became one of terror, said Bennyroyce Royon, the dance program director at the Filipino Community of Seattle. Royon described the rest of the festival as lively and beautiful.
Royon was shocked when a parent texted about the attack on Saturday evening.
“I think it really puts us into a reality check mode,” Royon said. “(My) hope is as a leader myself in the community, when I come back home, that we have a conversation about just our well-being (and) our safety.”
Filipina American activist Cindy Domingo, of Seattle, is worried about the impact on her community.
“I understand there were a lot of young people there, and I’m upset because they have to be exposed to such violence and society,” Domingo said. “They go to a historic festival named after a national hero of the Philippines. And they’re going up there for fun, for cultural awareness, (and) to be exposed to their culture and people. And then they have to face such tragedy.”
The event felt particularly poignant this year, as marginalized communities are impacted by the “trickle down” effects of the Trump administration in his crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion programs, immigrants, trans people and more, said Terrence Santos, an organizer behind Filipino Town Seattle, which promotes community events and local businesses.
The attack “is just something that has deeply affected so many of us in the diaspora,” Santos said.
Generations of Filipino families have traveled back and forth between the two cities, supporting small businesses, attending sporting events and visiting loved ones across the border, Santos said.
As the Trump administration’s aggressive trade policies and political threats have rocked U.S.-Canadian relations, Santos said it was “beautiful” to see Seattle Filipinos show up in Canada.
“To be on the ground and show there is love and support … between these two cities and Filipino communities we felt was necessary,” he said. “It’s sad to see those efforts are now marred because of this attack.”
Cabanilla said his family had planned to spend another day in Vancouver, but decided to come home early due to the tragedy.
Seattle Times reporter Jessica Fu contributed reporting from Vancouver, B.C. Material from The Associated Press was included in this report.
