Filipino nurses shaken by deaths at Vancouver’s Lapu-Lapu Day festival say tragedy ‘will not define us’ [Video]

Filipino-Canadian nurse Glesy Banton-Victoria says she had planned to attend the Lapu-Lapu Day street festival in Vancouver on Saturday, but took a nap instead, exhausted by a funeral earlier in the day. 

When she learned that a vehicle sped into a crowd of festival-goers at the Filipino community event, she says she was stunned by the horrific details, thinking, “Is this real?”

Banton-Victoria says she’s seen many dead bodies in her job as a veteran emergency room nurse at a Surrey, B.C., hospital, but expects she would have frozen in place if she had witnessed Saturday’s carnage.

“It hits home because it is home, the Filipino community,” said Banton-Victoria, born in Legazpi, a city in the southeast Philippines.

Police said Wednesday that 11 people had died, including three members of a family from Colombia, while a 22-month-old boy was among three people in serious condition. Dozens were sent to hospital …