Friends say Lyle Prijoles was an intellectual but would roll up his sleeves and take on whatever small, unglamorous task needed doing.

Those were among the qualities that drove the Filipino American community activist to travel the world to understand the lives of the most downtrodden — not as an abstraction, but up close and in person.

In recent years, Prijoles had taken his work back and forth between his home in the Bay Area and rural parts of the Philippines. It was in a beachside village in the city of Toboso in Negros Occidental that the 40-year-old was killed April 19 in a firefight between the Philippine Army and members of the communist New People’s Army insurgency.

He was one of 19 who died that day in an incident that remains bitterly disputed. Two of the dead were Filipino American U.S. citizens: Prijoles and Kai Dana Sorem, 26, of Seattle.

The army’s official statement says troops engaged an armed group in the early morning, resulting in “running firefights throughout the day.” It characterized the 19 dead as enemy combatants, calling the operation “a significant blow to the communist terrorist group’s operational capability.”

The New People’s Army has acknowledged that 10 of the dead were members of its armed revolutionary group but claims the others — two children, a journalist, a student leader, and a handful of activists, including Prijoles and Sorem — posed no military threat. 

Prijoles’ Bay Area friends are grieving a man they describe as quietly devoted, while waiting for answers that may never come. He is survived by his wife, Marienne Cuison, who is in the Philippines attempting to recover his body and spoke by phone at a press conference Monday.

Choking back tears, she lamented the lack of information. She said he was “kindhearted, a fan of history and ‘Star Wars,’ a caring uncle, a loving son, and a thoughtful brother.” Most of all, though, he cared for the everyday people from his homeland.

“He died doing what he did best: being with the masses and learning from them,” she said.

The U.S. government confirmed that two American citizens were killed but declined to comment. The Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights has launched an independent investigation into the incident. 

Negros Occidental produces more than half of the Philippines’ sugar yet is one of its poorest regions. For generations, community organizers say, vast hacienda-style landholdings have kept farmworkers from benefiting from their labor, with their wages locked in cycles of debt to the families whose land they work. Peasant organizers have spent decades pushing for land reform and living wages — efforts that the military has repeatedly met with violence, rights groups say.

Brandon Lee, chairperson of the U.S. chapter of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, survived a 2019 assassination attempt by the Philippine Army that paralyzed him. Prijoles was the godfather of his child.

He said the military often “red tags,” or publicly labels civilians and journalists as communist rebels. “The army is tarnishing the reputation of Lyle and the other civilians massacred through lies,” he said.

Lee was at home in San Francisco when friends broke the news. “It was very difficult and painful,” he said, “to hear that someone as loving as Lyle would just be gone.”

Prijoles, who grew up in San Diego before attending San Francisco State University, had traveled to the Philippines repeatedly as part of solidarity exposure trips organized by Bay Area-based human rights groups such as BAYAN USA (opens in new tab). Participants meet with farming families, hear their stories, and try to understand the conditions that political organizing back home can only begin to address.

The goal, according to Sadie Stone, a San Francisco United Methodist pastor who worked as an activist alongside Prijoles for a decade, is simple: “Their biggest request is always to take our stories and share them with the world.”

“He cared about people deeply,” said Stone. “He wasn’t someone who needed to be in front. He just wanted to help create a better world.”

Among young Filipino Americans, that history connects with an ancestry they wish to understand, said Melissa Reyes, a librarian at the San Francisco Public Library’s Filipino Center.

“The questions we ask ourselves about why our families had to leave — those answers can be found in the conditions of the people,” Reyes said.

She said her longtime friend Prijoles had a love of writing with a “dynamic and profound” curiosity and was committed to understanding the realities of “the most depressed and downtrodden.”