I’ve spent the last month missing my dear friends, Kai Sorem and Lyle Prijoles.
Kai and her bright tattoo of saxophone keys on her left forearm. I saw her last at a community gathering, where, unprepared, a group of us were asked to perform a cultural song. The audience, which had been sitting for hours, was floating away.
Our task was to bring them back, to ground them.
With a level head, Kai gathered us on stage. She placed us in formation: a guitarist here, singers there, someone on tech to project the lyrics.
She counted us in. Then, with steady hands, she began conducting.
We sang Bigas Hindi Bala, or Rice Not Bullets in Tagalog, a song calling on the Philippine government to provide food and relief to its people in need, rather than violence and terror. A song she learned in Cebu, the year before, when she visited the Philippines for the first time since her family left because of the country’s worsening conditions.
Kai was a former Central Washington University student who majored in music before dedicating her life to grassroots organizing with groups she helped establish, like Anakbayan South Seattle.
Unrehearsed but determined at that community gathering, we followed her lead, sang together, and connected with the audience.
And Lyle, whom I’ve known for close to a third of my life. We met on my first immersion trip to the Philippines, where he was my team lead. He was a thoughtful leader who also oozed silliness.
With precision and focus, he facilitated an educational discussion on the Second Propaganda Movement, laying out the importance of building an anti-imperialist movement in the Philippines. The next day, he convinced residents that I once owned the legendary basketball team, the Seattle SuperSonics.
After the Philippine army killed Kai, Lyle, and 17 others, including two minors, and many unarmed civilians, who were unmistakably non-combatants, our community in Seattle asked me to take an emergency trip to Negros Occidental in the Philippines.
That night, I boarded a plane and took off. I went to participate in an independent national fact-finding and solidarity mission to investigate the deaths of the victims, who became known as the Negros 19. I knew, going in, that those who were conducting the current investigation were the same people who killed them.
Once I landed, I attended a private briefing on the autopsies for several of the victims. The forensic pathologist revealed that many individuals sustained multiple gunshot wounds to the back, and at least one died because of blood loss — a life lost that could have been saved. Another was in a state of advanced decomposition because the Philippine military allowed their body to lie submerged in a fishpond for two days.
The doctor explained that, unimaginably, the Philippine military misidentified one of the bodies and subsequently gave it to the wrong family, saying it was their loved one. Today, the family still doesn’t know the whereabouts of their son, who, like Kai and Lyle, dedicated himself to learning and struggling alongside poor farmers and communities in the Philippines.
Beyond the autopsies, I witnessed the remains of several who were massacred. The back of one’s head was caved in from a bullet. I saw the inside of a skull for the first time, where the color grey is endless.
This culminated in visiting Toboso, where the Philippine army carried out the massacre. Here, I touched a bullet hole burned into a tree. I discovered a casing on the ground, and then another. Each, a gold jacket, shimmering, like leaves falling in sunlight. We had been told a trusted investigation had been carried out by the Philippine police, and yet, pieces of evidence were left scattered across the land.
Through all of this, the Philippine state surveilled, harassed, and intimidated our group, which was formed of over 100 lawyers, legislators, journalists, church leaders, human rights advocates, and more. The day before we arrived, the Philippine military told residents not to speak with us. We spotted suspicious individuals taking photographs of our caravan, including someone who followed us on a motorcycle.
Days before our mission even started, one of our participants, a United Methodist pastor and law student at the University of San Francisco School of Law, was detained at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila. Philippine officials interrogated her about her human rights work, including her involvement in a campaign for justice for Chinese American activist Brandon Lee, who survived an assassination attempt by the Philippine military in August 2019. She was then denied entry into the Philippines and, after a night of detention, sent back to the U.S.
While the Philippine military attempted to obstruct our independent investigation, we continued our efforts. Through witness testimonies, we confirmed that six of the massacre victims were known civilians, including Kai and Lyle, whom the residents cared about. They described how every time they saw them in the community, Kai and Lyle were helping farmers till the land and were eager to learn about the local issues of land grabbing and displacement.
They were described in the ways I remember them — kind-hearted and committed to serving those who are oppressed and exploited.
In our investigation, we confirmed, most notably, that Kai, Lyle, and the other civilians were never armed. These first-hand accounts directly contradict the Philippine military’s narrative that all those killed were combatants.
Further investigation also confirmed that soldiers committed multiple violations against civilians in the area: the forcible use of civilian homes as military encampments, harassment and intimidation in the name of counter-insurgency operations, restriction on farming activities, indiscriminate firing near homes, illegal detention, and even the alleged use of a farmer as a human shield.
In the Philippines, there is a culture of impunity. The state shields those in power and those with authority who commit crimes, even or most especially when they violate human rights and international humanitarian law.
We have seen this throughout Philippine history and as recently as former President Rodrigo Duterte’s “War on Drugs,” where police and the Philippine military were protected after extrajudicially killing over 30,000 people.
And still, the Filipino people continue to fight for justice and call for accountability. These efforts resulted in the International Criminal Court arresting former President Duterte last year to stand trial for his crimes.
Now, his successor, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the late President Ferdinand Marcos Sr., who ruled the Philippines under martial law, continues to carry out Duterte’s “War on Drugs.” As of writing this in June 2026, he was rejected from the United Nations Security Council after four years of campaigning about the “security” of the Philippines.
It’s because of this state terror that people mourning the lives of the Negros 19 have welcomed the recent vote of the United Nations to deny a seat for the Marcos administration in the United Nations Security Council — an administration that continues to direct attacks on civilians and allows the military to carry on with impunity.
When the Philippine state announced that Kai and Lyle were armed terrorists to justify their deaths, I spoke out alongside their families and other mission attendees at press conferences, tributes, vigils, and on news channels to share how beloved and cared for they were by people around the world.
Kai and Lyle were thoughtful, brilliant leaders in our community who left the comforts of the U.S. to struggle alongside peasants and farmers for their land in Negros, an area that’s highly representative of the semi-colonial, semi-feudal character of the Philippines.
Their massacre is one of many in Negros over the last few years, rooted in the widespread problem of landlessness, where peasants and farmers face intense exploitation tilling the land but never, in their lifetime, own it.
The question we should care about isn’t what Kai, Lyle, and other human rights advocates were doing at the site of an “armed encounter” but rather what the root causes of armed conflict in the Philippines are.
Kai and Lyle knew our people and our country wouldn’t be truly free until we addressed this question.
They understood the level of fascist attacks the Philippine state unleashes against those who organize, and still, they chose to go to the far-flung areas of the countryside to fight for the rights and welfare of peasants and farmers.
In what, unknowingly, became my last conversation with Lyle, I asked him, someone who has returned to the Philippines regularly since 2007, if he was ever scared of going home. He told me that even if he was scared at times, he never let fear stop him from returning.
I’m proud to have called Kai and Lyle my friends and commend them for dedicating their lives to serving the Filipino people.
While they may be gone, they’ve inspired a groundswell of people to take up and continue the fight for a free and democratic Philippines.
Troy Osaki is a Filipino Japanese attorney, poet, and organizer. He is a member of the Filipino Lawyers of Washington, the National Lawyers Guild, and People’s Lawyers for the Philippines, an organization of lawyers and law students bringing legal professionals into the broader mass movement to fight for genuine freedom and democracy in the Philippines. He is active in Filipino organizing efforts, such as the Defend Negros campaign. He lives in Seattle, WA.
