A driver plowed a car into a crowd at a street festival celebrating Filipino heritage in Vancouver on Saturday night, killing at least nine people and injuring others.

Some of those attending the festival helped arrest the suspect at the scene, who police identified as a 30-year-old man.

…

“It’s something you don’t expect to see in your lifetime,” Kris Pangilinan, a Toronto-based journalist, told Canadian public broadcaster CBC. “[The driver] just slammed the pedal down and rammed into hundreds of people. It was like seeing a bowling ball hit — all the bowling pins and all the pins flying up in the air.”

He continued, “It was like a war zone… There were bodies all over the ground.”

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    9·
    20 hours ago

    It does resemble a terrorist attack…

    But if you watched the press conference with the chief of police (or the equivalent title)…

    They have the suspect in custody, there were no specific threats to the event before hand, the suspect has a long history of mental illness, and the suspect has had many previous run ins with the police, ‘suspect is well known to the department’… gives me the impression this is a person who is having one kind of mental breakdown or another … every month or other week.

    At one point a reporter asked if it was terrorism and the CoP basically says… that would require a political or ideological motivation.

    The CoP … you could tell he was doing his best to divulge information he could without divulging information he couldn’t. He paused and tried to rephrase things a few times, openly struggled with … seemingly genuinely being unclear about what he was legally allowed to say.

    If the person truly is seriously mentally ill, there may be additional laws in place protecting some extra level of their privacy, at least before charges are actually brought.

    Put all that together, and it seems like this person has been just… very very seriously mentally ill for a long time, as in, too mentally ill to be capable of forming a coherent or describable ideology.

    Or, at the very least, that seems to me to be what the police are saying.