People pay their respects at a vigil near the site of the Lapu Lapu festival tragedy in Vancouver, B.C. on Tuesday.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
Good morning.
The election results are in, and the political landscape in British Columbia has changed dramatically.
Support for the NDP – so crucial in B.C., where the party had half its seats – utterly collapsed, leaving the party with only two, maybe three. The Liberals surged.
But seat counts come and go. The events of last weekend will leave a permanent mark, noted Sergeant Steve Addison of the Vancouver Police Department.
Saturday night, after a boisterous concert on what felt like the first day of summer, a deeply mentally ill young man allegedly drove his SUV at full speed through a crowded street festival, killing a mom and dad and their five-year-old daughter while their son stayed home doing homework. Killing a trans teaching assistant newly confident in their identity. Killing seven others and leaving 10 more in the hospital with critical or serious injuries. More were injured less seriously.
Vancouver fire chief Karen Fry, second from left, pays her respect at the vigil near the site of the Lapu Lapu festival tragedy in Vancouver, B.C.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
“We will never be normal again,” Addison said at a news briefing Monday.
Members of the Black Eyed Peas had just finished their concert at the Lapu-Lapu Filipino festival, a gathering named after an Indigenous resistance fighter who fought against Spanish colonization of the Philippines in the 16th century. Food trucks lined the side street behind John Oliver Secondary, the high school where many students are Filipino.
Teenagers Jihad Issa and Nic Magtajas heard an engine revving, then watched as the SUV raced down the road, tossing people high in the air. The vehicle got to the end of the street before it stopped, its hood crushed and engine smoking.
“Pure mayhem as soon as it happened,” Magtajas said. “It was so loud.”
In the aftermath, dozens of victims lay scattered on the ground, some wedged under food trucks. Many were grievously injured, others already gone.
Ambulances sped to the scene, as did every available police officer in the city, whether they’d been on duty or not.
According to witnesses, the driver of the SUV tried to run. He was detained by festivalgoers as police streamed to the zone.
The suspect has been identified as Kai-Ji Adam Lo, a 30-year-old man who lived with his mother a few minutes’ drive from the scene. He has been charged with eight counts of second-degree murder, and police say more charges are expected.
In a video provided to The Globe and Mail, Lo stands with his back against a chain-link fence wearing a sweatshirt, his hair slightly tousled. His expression appears vacant.
In exclusive reporting, Mike Hager, Nathan VanderKlippe and Kathryn Blaze Baum write of Lo’s tangled mental health.
People pay their respects at a vigil near the site of the tragedy.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
At the time of the festival, he was under the supervision of his local health authority and was supposed to be abiding by conditions after being released from a forced stint in hospital, a source told The Globe.
Lo had been in a local psychiatric ward in 2023 against his will. A year later, he was apprehended by police for another, shorter detention in the hospital at the request of his mental-health team, according to the source, who has knowledge of Lo’s interactions with authorities. The Globe is not naming the source because they were not authorized to speak publicly about Lo’s history.
His continued poor mental health – which neighbours and childhood friends say centred on paranoid delusions that he was being targeted by a number of adversaries – repeatedly led him to reach out to police in recent years, including in the week before the horrific attack.
Lo’s most recent forced stay in hospital, in 2024, occurred around the time his older brother, Alexander, was killed in a house a short drive from their family home. His mother later attempted suicide, according to an online fundraising effort launched by Lo.
But Lo had no criminal record and no charges against him.
Police have repeatedly been asked whether there was proper security at the festival.
But Vancouver’s interim police chief, Steve Rai, noted there are 3,200 festivals and events in the city every year. An assessment concluded the Lapu-Lapu festival was low-risk. Officers were on hand - they helped return a lost child to their parents, helped another festivalgoer find their car. It was low-risk until it wasn’t.
Other major cities have a greater variety of safety measures in place, such as bollards or dump trucks stationed on streets where people are gathering.
As André Picard points out in an important column, the vast majority of people with mental-health issues are not violent. And fortification isn’t necessarily an answer: The driver of a cube van who killed 11 people in Toronto in 2018 committed his carnage on a main thoroughfare.
But until Saturday, the preference wasn’t to fortify every public event, police have said.
Saturday means the calculation of what is safe has changed forever.
“This has changed all of us,” Addison said.
This is the weekly British Columbia newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.