Patricia Evangelista, a multimedia reporter with Rappler, joined the night shift in late August. She has written about conflict and disaster, including typhoon Haiyan in 2014, which claimed over 7,000 lives. As a rookie journalist, she reported on two activists who had been abducted, tortured, and killed by soldiers.

Patricia Evangelista: The worst cases are when the person is shot in the same area as their home, or in their neighborhood, or even if it’s a [body] dump, if they recognize the face, then that’s when you brace yourself, because the wife will walk in, the mother will walk in. And it’s weeping and wailing and screaming. And you know that you’re witness to the worst moment of a person’s life and you don't know if you’re a voyeur. And you don't know if you’re doing the right thing by asking questions.

There’s a pattern to it already. The first kind: the mother will walk in and there will be some tears and she’ll go, “Ya. That's my son.” “That’s my boy.” “That's my grandson.” “That’s my brother.” And they’ll walk away, and then if they talk to us, they’ll say, “Ya, he was an addict, but he’s a nice boy, he was recovering.” All of those things, but they’re not angry. They’ve seen it coming. And it’s Jerome’s fault, or Jonathan’s fault, or Jason’s fault. Lots of J’s, actually, in the field.

But the second kind: It’s when they don't believe it. They’re there. They see the face. And they're stomping their feet and screaming as loud as they can, as though if they screamed hard enough, it won't be true. There are the ones who are angry that there are cameras, that’s when we pull back. The worst of it is, the next day, or two days after, some tabloid will show the photo of the person ripped apart like a pig and say, “This is an addict or a [drug dealer].” That’s the last moment of a person’s life and that’s who he is. And that’s the image that’s left to them. So, when we walk in, maybe three days after, they scream at us at the funeral home or they push us away. “How dare you?” And they have every right, I mean, who can determine which media is what media? And we condoned it. We allowed it to happen. So, the night beat ends around five in the morning. ... We go to breakfast somewhere. And then we talk about things that have nothing to do with what we saw. Then we go home.

Lopez: I think the whole month of August I stopped checking Facebook because [the killings] were always in the news. I couldn’t look at it. I was out for three weeks. Just to rest my head from the brutal images. … I came back to the night shift and I must say that I was better. The nightmares were gone.

Lerma: It was one body after the other, but after Michael Siaron, I took time to get to know the families [of the victims]. ... From there, I could build a picture of what this person was like. ... [Siaron’s family] were very poor and I’m sorry to say, they lived like rats. They were living in a shanty in the middle of a creek filled with garbage. If he were an addict, did he deserve to die just like that? ... The reason I go to wakes, why I go to funerals is so that I [can] feel it, really feel it. … Sometimes I just go to a [crime] scene and it’s just a dead body for me. I know it’s taking its toll on me. … You feel a bit numb. ... But we always have to challenge ourselves not be numb. Because these are human beings. Every day, people are killed, a family loses a father, a son, a husband.