Editor’s Note: This article contains descriptions of violence that some readers may find upsetting. Resources offering support for readers and community members are available at the end of this story.
Campus community members gathered for a vigil on April 30 in front of UBC Bookstore to commemorate the victims and families affected by the Lapu Lapu Day Festival tragedy. In addition to holding space for grief, many speakers made calls for justice and action to prevent a similar tragedy.
Organized by Sulong UBC and UBC Kababayan, the vigil opened with a prayer at 2:30 p.m. Students, staff, faculty and university administrators were joined by a broader crowd of those looking to pay their respects.
“We gather carying grief so heavy and we gather carying names and faces we love,” said a speaker who introduced themselves as Daniel.
“Names and faces that should still be here with us today”, he continued.
Statements of solidarity were heard from Sulong UBC, UBC Kababayan, UBC Sprouts and the UBC Central American Student Association, all reiterating calls for community care and justice.
“It's important that all facts and answers are brought to light without delay and that accountability must be established," said a representative from Sulong UBC.
On April 26 just after 8 p.m., a man drove a black Audi SUV down a closed section of Fraser Street and into festival attendees celebrating Filipino heritage. The BC Prosecution Service has since charged Kai-Ji Adam Lo with eight counts of second-degree murder.
As of publication time, 11 people have been killed and dozens more injured while several remain hospitalized in varying condition.
Among the victims was Kira Salim, a New Westminster teacher-counsellor and a former administrative staff at UBC’s School of Music as recently as 2023, according to an online statement made by the school.
Salim’s work, New Westminster Schools said, “and the great spirit they brought to it, changed lives.”
“The loss of our friend and colleague has left us all shocked and heartbroken," wrote New Westminster Schools in a statement posted to its website.
Burnaby city councillor Maita Santiago addressed the various ongoing investigations regarding the tragedy.
“I hope that as we grieve, we also come together and rise [and] leave no stone unturned," Santiago began, before extending her call for listeners to focus on learning lessons from the tragedy in place of assigning blame:
"Every single facet of this horrific tragedy needs to be examined, from the lack of mental health supports, to what more the city had done to what more the police had done ... to what more ... have been done on that day by people that directly had the capacity … to do something,” she said.
“We're going to have more festivals. We need to. We're going to gather again,” Santiago said in culmination.
In the hour before the vigil, Premier David Eby announced the government was initiating a review of the Mental Health Act: a provincial law governing involuntary treatment for mental disorders.
Lo was being supervised by Vancouver Coastal Health under the authority of the Mental Health Act at the time of the attack. However, the health authority has said that they had no knowledge of any “recent change in his condition or noncompliance with his treatment plan that would've warranted him needing to be hospitalized involuntarily,” according to reporting done by the CBC.
The province has been facing a constitutional challenge to the legislation since 2016, which Eby cited as the reason the review was not initiated earlier, despite agreement among the BC NDP, BC Conservatives and BC Green Party that a review is needed.
The province’s review will be led by Minister of Health Josie Osborne and Dr. Daniel Vigo — the chief scientific advisor for psychiatry, toxic drugs and concurrent disorders to the government of BC and an associate professor in UBCs Department of Psychiatry and School of Population and Public Health respectively.
The province declared May 2 an official day of remembrance and has coordinated an online book of condolences, taking messages until May 5.
Dr. JP Catungal, a UBC assistant professor of critical racial and ethnic studies, also gave a few words at the vigil, at times with a tearful voice.
“We've lit too many candles and we've laid down too many flowers before, and here we are yet again,” said Catungal. “We continue to fight for our futures — not just for survival, not just for resilience, but for our genuine collective flourishing.”
Catungal closed his remarks with a poem titled “the garden on fraser and 41st” written by UBC alum Sol Diana.
“On Saturday, our home was turned into a crime scene,” Catungal read aloud, “on Sunday, we laid flowers to rest and turned Fraser and 41st into a garden.”
Christian Sanchez, a member of Sulong UBC, helped organize the vigil to “put [his] grief into action.”
“A vigil for the victims here at UBC is very [much] needed because there's a lot of Filipino students here, a lot of Filipino workers that are very integral in the functioning of this campus,” Sanchez said.
Cass Del Rosario, a member of UBC Kababayan, also helped organize the vigil and said it was “really nice to see a lot of people come out.”
“And it wasn't just students,” Del Rosario said.
“It was staff, it was faculty: it was the greater community. So it meant a lot for them to make space for us and for our collective loss.”
Both organizers emphasized the vigil's focus on calls to action.
“The Filipino community is looking for answers as to why this happened,” started Sanchez.
“It's really important for us to know that a thorough investigation is going to be had, that everything that was preventable in this tragedy is addressed and taken accountability for,” he said.
With increasing scrutiny coming onto the way the municipal, provincial and federal governments address mental health in the wake of the tragedy, Sanchez claimed much attention has been paid only to the mental health of the accused. But for Sanchez, an investigation — and subsequent change — needs to be more holistic.
“For us, true healing for us actually comes from systemic changes."
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