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 …