In the immediate aftermath of the Lapu-Lapu Day attack, when the horror of the situation was clear, but police were yet to arrive, a furious crowd rushed towards the suspect.
But one man stood between them. Dudley Green, a former bodyguard, had been attending the festival like everyone else, without a clue about what was going to happen.
“I heard someone scream, and I turned my head, and I saw this black thing, just literally, like think about the blink of an eye, that’s how fast it was moving, going this way, and I saw bodies, flying through the air,” said Green.
Green followed the path of carnage and found the suspect, backed against a fence. Then he made a decision – he stepped in front of him.
“I had to deal with this mass of people, who were very upset of course, rightly so, very angry, and wanted to do grievous bodily harm to this individual.”
After watching an SUV speed through the busy block party, protecting the alleged perpetrator was the last thing most people wanted to do. But Green knew that the potential consequences for those involved would only fracture the community even further.
“When I rationalize it, if they had killed that guy, then the police would be looking for the guys who killed him, and that would have made it even more horrific,” said Green.
That logic helped Green de-escalate the situation.
He says he remembers one person in particular who tried to get past him.
“He just patted me on the arm and he said, ‘Hey, big guy, please man, just move out of the way.’ And I looked in the eyes, and I knew, this guy would be dead if I moved. I said to him, ‘If I move out of the way, and you do what you’re planning to do, who’s going to look after your family?’ I don’t know if I can swear or not, but his exact words were, ‘This motherf***** needs to die.’ I said, ‘I don’t disagree, but we got to wait for the police. And he just started crying.”
Soon after, police arrested Kai-Ji ‘Adam’ Lo, who’s now been charged with 11 counts of second-degree murder, and 31 counts of attempted murder.
In the year since, Green says he’s dealt with mental health issues, and even harassment in public from those who felt he should have let the crowd decide the suspect’s fate. But there have also been instances of gratitude, like when he was approached in a coffee shop by a man he’d held back.
“He said, ‘Thank you, I appreciate what you did, because you saved the lives of a lot of other people that day, that people do not understand.’”
For his part, Green thinks the real heroes that day were the first responders, who helped keep the death toll from rising in the days after the attack. He says he was just following his mom’s advice.
“I’ll never forget these words ‘til I die, she said, ‘It’s never easy to do the right thing in a difficult situation. But if you don’t do the right thing in a difficult situation, you’ll never know the change or impact you’re going to make.’”
And while it was unpopular in the moment – Green hopes that, besides preventing even more families from being torn apart, he was able to preserve the answers that only due process can bring to light.