Vancouver police Sgt. Jesse Schellenberg was on shift the night of April 26, 2025.
He was driving in the area of Fraser Street and East 41st Avenue when calls started coming in about a pedestrian hit-and-run nearby.
As more police officers raced to the scene, it quickly became apparent there were multiple victims involved.
“I’m not even sure you could describe the horror that I first saw,” Schellenberg told Global News.
“You get out of your car and you just see everything that has been in reports and all the horror that was in front of you.”
Vancouver police Const. Bronwyn Kirk was also on working that night.
“I remember just looking down 42nd from Fraser and it was just absolute chaos,” she said.
“There were people screaming, people lying on the ground and I think in that moment I couldn’t really process what exactly I was looking at because in my head we were going to a hit and run.”
Vancouver police Const. Jamie DeBacker said she turned a corner and saw multiple people lying on the ground.
It was a clear and sunny Saturday when hundreds of people gathered on the grounds and the surrounding street of John Oliver Secondary School to celebrate Filipino culture, food and people.
“Everything just kind of fell into place so perfectly, along with the weather, just like it was … a really special day or like a lot of happy smiling families,” Christi-Ann Watkins, a performer at the festival and a survivor.
“It was a really great thing to experience.”
“With an event that big, obviously, there’s a lot of different things that need to be taken care of, so we’re all split up into teams,” Watkins said.
“I was helping out the production team, so along with being a performer myself, DJ’ing on the main stage and the smaller stages, I was also organizing the breakdance competition that was happening at the smaller stage, on the dance stage.”
Joe Tuliao was the creative director of the festival and said the vibe was electric.
“Honestly, so memorable having, you know, Black Eyed Peas perform their iconic songs and on that John Oliver field that was just full of people and jumping and all that,” Tuliao said. “I still remember it to this day; when I looked through footage of that, it was a surreal moment.”
Tuliao said that when the festival ended, he and his team did the rounds to close out the three main stages and after, they decided to get some food from the food trucks as they hadn’t eaten all day.
Watkins and Tuliao met up at the food trucks with a small group and were already talking about the 2026 event — what they could do and how they could improve the festival.
It was “around eight o’clock, because I remember right, as we were chatting, Joe had taken a selfie of all of us together,” Watkins said.
Five minutes later, a car drove through the crowd, striking dozens of people.
‘I thought it was an explosion’
One of the food trucks there that day was the Kampong Food Truck, serving up authentic Malay food.
Owner/operator Mohamad Sariman said they were so busy all day, they didn’t even get a break themselves. But they were happy.
“We were all enjoying dancing, all my workers were like enjoying and dancing and we’re very happy on that day, actually,” Mohamad said.
But tragedy struck where moments earlier they had been serving happy customers their delicious food.
“I heard a loud bang, like a loud noise, and I thought it was an explosion,” Mohamad said. “Immediately, my head was, you know, looking out the window and I saw a body flying right, like quite high, above here and then I was like, oh, bang, then she fell.
“I didn’t see the car because he must have gone past, but it was like a surprise for me. And then we looked out of the window, we had seen a lot of bodies lying around all the way there actually.”
Saadiah Sariman, chef at the Kampong Food Truck, said she saw the black car driving past, fast, and then she heard the noise.
“I saw all the bodies in front of here and at the back too,” she said. “Like I was so shaking, you know?”
A victim lies near a food truck after a car drove into a crowd at the Lapu Lapu Festival in Vancouver on Saturday April 26, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Rich Lam.
RXL
Tuliao said he thought they were being attacked. He ran behind a food truck with his friend to hide.
Watkins said she remembers everything.
“I just remember, the only thing that makes sense to me at the time was ‘I’m getting hit by something,’” she said. “Just like the crashing of metal, the sounds of metal and just images of bright lights, of just getting hit. I can’t explain it any more than that, but just I know what my experience was.”
She said someone ran to her to put their hands against her head, telling her not to move her neck. She could hear someone else performing CPR on a female close by, saying she had no pulse.
Watkins said she worried immediately because her son has shoulder-length hair and is often mistaken for a girl and she started panicking.
It wasn’t her son; he was hurt, but he was alive.
“He had a laceration to the spleen and he had a fractured nose bridge, so he had to be in the hospital for, I think, one night,” Watkins said.
“He doesn’t remember anything at all. Nothing. And we’ve spoken to therapists and counselors and stuff and they’ve all, you know, have said that it’s just his brain trying to protect him. So he definitely saw a lot more than I did. He, yeah. But he doesn’t remember it.”
Watkins suffered a fractured right knee, a fractured left pelvis, lacerations to her kidneys and spleen, broken ribs on her left side, a broken bone in her neck and a huge laceration to her head, along with severe road rash.
As Schellenberg surveyed the scene, his attention was broken by a large group of people calling him over, cornering someone up against a fence.
“Based on the totality of circumstances, I knew that this was likely the driver of the car,” he said.
Schellenberg was the first officer to encounter the suspect.
“I could see when I first parked that there was a car in front of me that had its front end smashed in completely and I understood that this was likely going to be a mass casualty incident so I knew that this person needed to be arrested,” he said.
“So I grabbed him, I started walking him away from the area where everyone was containing him by the fence and the crowd started to turn quite hostile. There were people grabbing onto myself, grabbing onto the suspect, so at that point I was pretty worried that we were going to get swarmed and that it could turn violent.”
Schellenberg said he and his partner ran out of the area with the suspect. They arrested him and then Schellenberg left the suspect with his partner and returned to the scene.
First responders on the scene
DeBacker remembers looking down that street lined with food trucks on either side.
“There is multiple people saying ‘My family’s in there, my friends are in there.’ I also have my radio going on, but honestly, at that time, I could not make out what was going on in my ear because of just all the stuff I was trying to take in in front of me,” she said.
Schellenberg said he doesn’t know if anyone in the Vancouver Police Department has ever been part of anything that catastrophic before.
“You try and find the quiet ones,” he said. “You try and find the people who can’t call out for help, who are unconscious or losing consciousness, who have no one else around them, who’s not caring for them and try and get them care.”
One moment is stuck in Schellenberg’s mind.
“As I come back, I saw a little girl crying off to the side,” he said. “She was probably about five or six years old. And I saw two people, two ladies, who were holding up a phone in front of her face. The girl was standing next to a woman who had passed on the sidewalk. And this six-year-old had a phone held up in front of her face and these two ladies were playing cartoons on the phone to try and comfort this girl.
“And she was just wailing.”
Schellenberg knew this wasn’t a place for a child, so he asked the two ladies who were with the girl to move their daughter out of there.
“And they said, ‘It’s not our daughter.’ And I said, ‘Okay, well, whoever this is to you, can you try and get your child out of there? ‘” he said.
“And they say, ‘Can you come here, officer?’ So I leaned in and they said that’s her mother, who had passed. This child was trying to figure out how to process that kind of trauma next to her dead mom with a cartoon she had no awareness was even playing.”
Vancouver police look over a black car believed to be involved in an incident where a vehicle drove into a crowd at the Lapu Lapu Festival in Vancouver on Saturday April 26, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Rich Lam.
RXL
Schellenberg recalled there were many people stepping forward to help each other that day.
“There were people who were standing next to deceased people for hours, guarding them for evidentiary purposes, to preserve their story to pass on to follow-up investigators, and didn’t ask for a thing,” he said.
“There were members who, finally, into the wee hours in the morning, were offered a jacket by members of the public and I talked to them afterwards. They said they didn’t even realize they were cold.”
DeBacker said it is so different being there in person.
“One person, their life is so full,” she said. “So many people are affected by one person passing away. It’s heartbreaking how much carnage and hurt and trauma this one person caused.”
Kirk said she hasn’t been able to go back to the site yet, but Schellenberg said he finds it healing to drive through the area.
“It’s my city, it’s my block, I run it. I’ll do what I want and I won’t let that incident make me feel otherwise.”
B.C. paramedic Eliza Rideout also described bystanders stepping up to help where they could.
“Everyone on scene was helping in some way,” she said. “They were helping others connect with their loved ones, helping bring people’s belongings to them, things like that. There’s other bystanders that were, you know, family members that weren’t even at the festival that were arriving to help, and seeing everyone just coming together in that community and helping each other was very impactful.”
Rideout said that before she left work that night she sent her husband a warning text about what she had seen.
“So he stayed awake for me that night, and I got home, I mean, we chatted for a long time, and we sat together for a lot, and a long time that night and I had a few tears before bed, yeah, and got up in the morning and went to work again.”
Vancouver Fire Chief Karen Fry said 40 firefighters and eight trucks responded to the mass casualty event that April 26. She said 80 per cent of those firefighters filed WorkSafeBC claims.
“So 32 people had active WorkSafe claims and we’ve had two not returned to work,” she said.
“It’s still really raw. It’s really raw with our city, I think, with that community, I am sure. And really raw, with our firefighters, that sticks with me.”
Eleven victims were killed in the Lapu Lapu attack:
Jenifer Darbellay, 50
Kira Ganapol Salim, 34
Vicky Bjarnason, 55
Glitza Daniela Samper, 30
Glitza Maria Caicedo-Samper, 60
Daniel Samper Toro, 65
Jendhel Sico, 27
Richard Le, 47
Katie Le, 5
Linh Hoang, 30
Nerissa Pagkanlungan, 46
People hold a candlelight march during a vigil on the street where a vehicle-ramming attack occurred at the Filipino community’s Lapu Lapu Day festival last week, on a provincial day of mourning for the victims, in Vancouver, on Friday, May 2, 2025.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
Watkins said she has returned to the site of the tragedy twice.
“I struggle,” she said. “It was really, really dramatic and scary, but it’s also like knowing what that day was, how beautiful it was before all that.
“I definitely tried to avoid going for a really, really long time because I was afraid of how it was gonna affect me. But I had to visit before they moved the memorial, just so that I could see how people kind of sent their well wishes and their thoughts and their prayers, and just I felt like I owed it to myself to see that in person.”
