It was nearly 8 p.m. and dead quiet on a typically hot and muggy evening near the coastal community of Batangas City in the Philippines.
Until the hum and rattle of an approaching motorcycle broke the silence.
It was June of this past summer, and Luzie Gammon was in the kitchen of the dream home she built with her Canadian husband, Barry Gammon, when the hum was replaced by the piercing and unmistakable sound of a gun being fired, over and over and over again.
She ran to the front porch to see her husband, 66, struggling to close their gate on an intruder. "We're pushing together, and he just keeps shooting and shooting," she said during a recent interview with The Fifth Estate.
And then, she said, "my husband drops." Gammon paused as she struggled to recall the details. And then she continued.
"His face, his blood on the floor and … he's bleeding. At that moment, it's just like, this is not real, what's going on? I'm acting and doing, but it's not registering in my mind. Is this real?"
She snapped suddenly back to reality when she realized their seven-year-old son, JJ, was standing behind her, frozen.
"I grabbed my son and pushed him … inside the house," she continued.
"'Stay here, and I'll get some help,'" she recalled telling JJ. "But he didn't want … it's just really … heartbreaking. He told me, 'We need to help daddy.'"
She told him to stay put.
"'No, Mommy. I'm going to come with you,'" he said. "We will die all together."
Barry Gammon died on that June 24 evening in the Philippines. Luzie and JJ survived. Five weeks after the fatal shooting, they left the Philippines for Canada. (more...)
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