Vigil Honors Life of Man Fatally Shot

Standing quietly in the cool evening under a gray sky, the Rev. Larry Tyler Wayman tried to control his sadness as he presided over yet another vigil for a young man’s senseless death in Oxnard.

The young man, Jose Basilan, was more than a statistic.

The death has left his mother childless and ripped a hole through Oxnard’s tight-knit Filipino community. The pain was palpable at the vigil, held across the street from the corner restaurant where Basilan was fatally shot early Sunday. More than a dozen people showed up to pay their respects.

Basilan was his mother’s pillar of support who played the role of protector, confidant and son.

But at 24 years old, his life was snuffed out by an apparent stranger who decided to settle an argument with a bullet.

If anything, Basilan’s death should not be in vain, said Wayman, who organized the vigil with Basilan’s friends, family and members of Oxnard’s interdenominational Faith Connection.

“We want to let the people know that they are not alone,” Wayman said. “This young man is our brother, our son.”

As his friend and mentor Danny Victorio tells it, Basilan was a role model to young kids who were running around, getting into trouble and losing their way. Basilan had a reputation as a fighter, a backup man, Victorio said, but lately he had been trying to become a peacemaker.

Basilan was leading them to the safety of the Papawis Sports Assn. where they could play basketball and talk about turning their lives around, Victorio said.

“This kid was an outstanding kid in terms of reliability,” said Victorio, himself a former street thug and the founder of the 5-year-old Papawis club. “His life was beginning to bloom in a positive direction. He was trying to get his friends off the streets.”

This past year had been especially hard for Basilan, who had been trying to come to terms with the death of his sister Maria-Ressie Basilan. Like her brother, Maria-Ressie died at 24, exactly one year before Jose Basilan was admitted to the hospital.

The siblings were so tight that Jose Basilan contemplated suicide after her death, said his mother, Teresita Hacuman. But Hacuman convinced her only son that she needed him, that he was her only source of support.

“My son knew that he was the only one I had,” said Hacuman, who moved to Oxnard from the Philippines in 1976. “We kept each other company and consoled each other.”

But now Hacuman has only photographs and memories of her two children.

“The most traumatic thing is that I lost both of them,” Hacuman said. “I think I was strong with my daughter but with my son I break down. Right now I am totally lost.”