After surviving shooting, Sim chooses forgiveness
Grappling with the fatal shooting of his best friend and recovering from his own bullet wounds, Bun Sim chooses forgiveness.
Sim was the first man shot by 31-year-old Raymond Alliman in what would, just moments later, become double fatal shootings in the ByWard Market the morning of June 3.
After shooting Sim, while fleeing police, Alliman shot and killed Terrence Phillips, 43. The gunman then fled into a parking garage where a shootout ensued with tactical officer Const. Aaron Reichert. Alliman was killed in the exchange of gunfire. The Special Investigations Unit is now investigating both deaths.
Hours before the shootings, Sim was throwing Phillips a birthday party.
“Everyone was happy,” Sim told the Citizen, in his first account of the fatal events. “No bad vibes.” Friday night’s good times gave way to Saturday morning ’s Market tension. Sim said he didn’t know Alliman but at the end of the birthday festivities, sideways glances led to words being exchanged.
“I tried to stop the situation and he shot me,” Sim said. Sim was shot in the stomach. The bullet went through his back. Blood was “shooting out of” him and his best friend Phillips took off after the gunman.
Sim wishes Phillips hadn’t chased Alliman — a decision that contributed to Phillip’s fatal end. But Sim figures Phillips thought Sim had been killed and that he was trying to stop a man he believed to be his friend’s killer.
“That’s why he’s my boy,” Sim said.
Friends put pressure on Sim’s wounds and stayed with him until the ambulance arrived. When Sim found out that Phillips was dead, he was “broken” and “crushed.”
Phillips was a “family man and a loyal friend,” Sim said.
“‘T’ would give you the shirt off his back,” Sim said. “I met him when I was 12. He taught me everything I know.”
They’d been friends for more than two decades.
“I love him and miss him every day.”
Sim thinks the violence that injured him and claimed his friend’s life was senseless.
“It’s all bulls--t … for nothing.”
That the man responsible for the shootings was ultimately stopped and killed by police is no comfort to him.
“Nobody should die this way,” Sim said.
“Everyone (is) affected. He has a family, too.”
Sim wants other young men who may think about resorting to violence to see the impact it has on so many people.
“We all have to put hate aside and show more love and respect for each other.”
His life has now forever been changed because of violence.
Before June 3, Sim and Phillips were fathers, working 9-5 jobs to support their families, he said.
Things changed for both of their families and Alliman’s family that morning.
Sim also said he wasn’t angry in the moments after he was injured.
“All I could think about was my kids and family.”
He prayed that if he survived, he would forgive the shooter.
That resolve was tested when he found out Phillips was dead, but now anger won’t bring his best friend back.