montana_16
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Looking at their pictures is just heartbreaking. Their lives, their futures, gone in an instant. So incredibly sad.
7 Canadian high school basketball players and 1 adult killed in highway crash
- Thread starter Dark Knight
- Start date
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This is a situation that no parent should have to face. The parents were waiting for the boys in a fast food restaurant and the boys were only 5 minutes away.
This is horrific, the pain of knowing that your child will never grow up, graduate, get married, and start a family is a pain that will never go away. The future of all of these boys were lost.
The Toronto professional basketball team paid a silent to the boys before a game.
Canada is in mourning for the young men who lost their lives.
This is horrific, the pain of knowing that your child will never grow up, graduate, get married, and start a family is a pain that will never go away. The future of all of these boys were lost.
The Toronto professional basketball team paid a silent to the boys before a game.
Canada is in mourning for the young men who lost their lives.
shdbepaintin
New Member
Having raised four sons, all in sports, I can attest that this is
every parents nightmare.
My heart breaks for the parents of these boys. And the family pf the dedicated Coach's wife.
I always felt like sports is what kept my boys out of trouble. I think
it does. I imagine these were fine boys with parents encouraging them
to do well and stay out of trouble. What a tragedy.
I pray for comfort for all.
every parents nightmare.
My heart breaks for the parents of these boys. And the family pf the dedicated Coach's wife.
I always felt like sports is what kept my boys out of trouble. I think
it does. I imagine these were fine boys with parents encouraging them
to do well and stay out of trouble. What a tragedy.
I pray for comfort for all.
Mimi
New Member
From our local paper...
http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/front/article/181941
Bathurst's heart broken
A look at a New Brunswick community, now that everything has changed forever
makeCompatibleBookmark(); By Brent Mazerolle
Times & Transcript Staff Published Monday January 14th, 2008
Appeared on page A1
Until Friday night, it was an utterly unremarkable spot, a few metres of straight highway at the summit of a New Brunswick hill.
But now and forever more, it will be the place where Bathurst's heart broke in two.
The scene of the collision that killed seven high school students and a local teacher Friday night is now also the dividing line where the community's history has been torn asunder. For decades to come, many people in Bathurst will recall the other events of their lives as having happened either before the accident or after the accident.
Not that any of that is completely clear yet.
"There's not very much that's sinking in today," Father Gregory Culligan told parishioners at Sacred Heart Cathedral on Saturday afternoon.
Built in 1886, the granite Roman Catholic cathedral is a key spiritual centre of the community. From its front steps you look directly at Bathurst High School a block away.
His voice breaking as he began his homily, Father Culligan said, "the unimaginable has happened. The most dreadful and devastating experience has been visited upon us. Our worst fears have been realized."
The parish priest aptly captured the mood in Bathurst this weekend. That there was widespread grief is obvious. Less obvious was that the magnitude of the loss seemed almost beyond people's capacity to grieve. Similar tragedies, and there have been many in New Brunswick in recent months, have carried with them certain rituals that seemed muted in Bathurst Saturday. It was as if people were too stunned to even avail themselves of the comfort to be derived from performing such simple ceremonies.
One of the methods by which young people especially have chosen to mourn in recent times is the website Facebook, and the tragedy in Bathurst has proved no different. Within a dozen hours of the accident tribute pages were popping up in cyberspace.
But markedly absent, at least on Saturday, were the makeshift memorials that usually pop up in the real world. At the crash site, Saturday came and went without a single rose or teddy bear or votive candle or any other mostly futile effort to soften the horror of such a grisly scene. It was suppertime Saturday before the first bouquets of flowers were laid on the steps of the high school. On Sunday however, the memorials began to appear, none more dramatically than the basketball nets erected right at the crash site.
Adding to otherworldly blur of Saturday was the fact that most of those most closely affected had not slept since they started their days Friday morning. Families and friends had stayed up Friday night waiting for the Phantoms to return from an evening game against the Purple Knights at the Moncton High School gymnasium.
Many were gathered at a McDonald's restaurant to meet the school van. Because of cell phones, those waiting had a very good idea of when it would arrive and the worry of loved ones out on slippery roads would be over.
The van, driven by Phantoms coach Wayne Lord, held nine players, Lord's wife Beth, and his daughter Katie, a 12th grader at Bathurst High. They had just passed the city's Welcome to Bathurst sign and were literally a second or two from seeing the large overhead highway signs denoting the first exit into the city. And then the van slid on the slushy road, colliding with a southbound tractor trailer.
Tense moments passed at the McDonalds. Then there were sirens and then came a call for people to make their way to the Chaleur Regional Hospital.
Because of police scanners and text messaging and the small town nature of a city of just 12,000 souls, word spread fast. More people made their way to the hospital or the crash scene, adding chaos to the nightmare.
By 4 a.m., Bathurst High had opened its doors and become the epicentre of the community's grief. The city's restaurants stepped up in no time to provide free food and the wider community came forward to do whatever it could. When the high school closed its doors late Saturday afternoon so staff could get some rest, the Bathurst Youth Centre took over as a drop-in place. The youth centre is uptown, across from the K.C. Irving Centre where a community funeral for all eight victims will be held this week.
It's also next door to the city's other high school, Ecole Secondaire Népisiguit, where the flags were at half mast and all was in darkness.
Out of respect for the youth and privacy of those grieving inside the centre, a Times & Transcript reporter remained outside, but spoke to several young people who chose to approach him and share reminisces of their friends.
Marc Dumas said he lost seven friends, but was particularly close to Daniel Hains. "It doesn't matter if I was doing good or bad. Dan was always there to help me out," he said.
As others joined the conversation, a picture emerged of how the school had lost its centre, how those dead were some of the school's most popular boys. Many played several sports and all were well known throughout the city and beyond.
There was a poignant tale of a life interrupted. One of the dead boys and his girlfriend had recently split up. Before he left for Moncton Friday, he slipped a note into her locker expressing hope they could get back together. The girl only found it on Saturday, when she joined the grieving throngs at BHS.
"Everybody's like a big family at BHS," Dumas said. "I've never seen people like this. It's hurt so many people."
When the group, by this time grown to 15 or 20, almost all young men, were complimented on how they were holding up at that moment, Corey Scott said, "We've got no more tears left."By then, 18 hours had passed since the accident and almost 36 hours since most had last slept, and the raw emotion began to boil over.
While most wanted to continue telling a wider world about the friends they had lost, a few young men who joined the conversation suddenly became extremely agitated by the presence of a reporter, making it impossible for the tributes for their peers to continue.
For the people of Bathurst who couldn't or wouldn't articulate their grief, their mayor rose to the challenge of speaking for them. Mayor Stephen Brunet, a career teacher, eloquently took the lead for his community, even as he grieved for friends and sympathized with the suffering of his neighbours the Lords. He said Saturday was just a blur, but reality was setting in on Sunday."When we lost our mill, I thought that would be the hardest thing we ever faced," he said Sunday, "but that was nothing like this."
Perhaps because the city has withstood other adversity over the years, like the closure of the Smurfit-Stone Paper Mill and the loss of almost 300 jobs, life did in fact go on for many in the city this weekend. For all the grief seen in Bathurst, and it was vast, it was not total as many media reports in the past 48 hours have suggested.
Many families enjoyed a day of sledding on the partly sunny Saturday afternoon, a day so glorious for January it was hard to believe what heartbreak the weather had caused just the night before.
People still shopped for groceries and ran errands. The city may only have a population of 12,000 but it is the retail centre of a wider region with a population closer to 50,000.
At Wal-Mart, shoppers smiled and joked with friends they ran into. What was different though was how often people in the midst of hearty, happy conversations would catch themselves, look shyly around and lower their voices.
While Bathurst may be a bustling city for its size, and while at times things may have seemed almost normal this weekend, there is no question a painful inescapable fact hung over every moment.
"We think we belong to a big community, but today we realize how very small we are." Father Culligan told his congregation, in a message similar to those delivered at churches throughout the region Sunday morning. "Everybody has been affected and most of us devastated by what has befallen us
http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/front/article/181941
Bathurst's heart broken
A look at a New Brunswick community, now that everything has changed forever
makeCompatibleBookmark(); By Brent Mazerolle
Times & Transcript Staff Published Monday January 14th, 2008
Appeared on page A1
Until Friday night, it was an utterly unremarkable spot, a few metres of straight highway at the summit of a New Brunswick hill.
But now and forever more, it will be the place where Bathurst's heart broke in two.
The scene of the collision that killed seven high school students and a local teacher Friday night is now also the dividing line where the community's history has been torn asunder. For decades to come, many people in Bathurst will recall the other events of their lives as having happened either before the accident or after the accident.
Not that any of that is completely clear yet.
"There's not very much that's sinking in today," Father Gregory Culligan told parishioners at Sacred Heart Cathedral on Saturday afternoon.
Built in 1886, the granite Roman Catholic cathedral is a key spiritual centre of the community. From its front steps you look directly at Bathurst High School a block away.
His voice breaking as he began his homily, Father Culligan said, "the unimaginable has happened. The most dreadful and devastating experience has been visited upon us. Our worst fears have been realized."
The parish priest aptly captured the mood in Bathurst this weekend. That there was widespread grief is obvious. Less obvious was that the magnitude of the loss seemed almost beyond people's capacity to grieve. Similar tragedies, and there have been many in New Brunswick in recent months, have carried with them certain rituals that seemed muted in Bathurst Saturday. It was as if people were too stunned to even avail themselves of the comfort to be derived from performing such simple ceremonies.
One of the methods by which young people especially have chosen to mourn in recent times is the website Facebook, and the tragedy in Bathurst has proved no different. Within a dozen hours of the accident tribute pages were popping up in cyberspace.
But markedly absent, at least on Saturday, were the makeshift memorials that usually pop up in the real world. At the crash site, Saturday came and went without a single rose or teddy bear or votive candle or any other mostly futile effort to soften the horror of such a grisly scene. It was suppertime Saturday before the first bouquets of flowers were laid on the steps of the high school. On Sunday however, the memorials began to appear, none more dramatically than the basketball nets erected right at the crash site.
Adding to otherworldly blur of Saturday was the fact that most of those most closely affected had not slept since they started their days Friday morning. Families and friends had stayed up Friday night waiting for the Phantoms to return from an evening game against the Purple Knights at the Moncton High School gymnasium.
Many were gathered at a McDonald's restaurant to meet the school van. Because of cell phones, those waiting had a very good idea of when it would arrive and the worry of loved ones out on slippery roads would be over.
The van, driven by Phantoms coach Wayne Lord, held nine players, Lord's wife Beth, and his daughter Katie, a 12th grader at Bathurst High. They had just passed the city's Welcome to Bathurst sign and were literally a second or two from seeing the large overhead highway signs denoting the first exit into the city. And then the van slid on the slushy road, colliding with a southbound tractor trailer.
Tense moments passed at the McDonalds. Then there were sirens and then came a call for people to make their way to the Chaleur Regional Hospital.
Because of police scanners and text messaging and the small town nature of a city of just 12,000 souls, word spread fast. More people made their way to the hospital or the crash scene, adding chaos to the nightmare.
By 4 a.m., Bathurst High had opened its doors and become the epicentre of the community's grief. The city's restaurants stepped up in no time to provide free food and the wider community came forward to do whatever it could. When the high school closed its doors late Saturday afternoon so staff could get some rest, the Bathurst Youth Centre took over as a drop-in place. The youth centre is uptown, across from the K.C. Irving Centre where a community funeral for all eight victims will be held this week.
It's also next door to the city's other high school, Ecole Secondaire Népisiguit, where the flags were at half mast and all was in darkness.
Out of respect for the youth and privacy of those grieving inside the centre, a Times & Transcript reporter remained outside, but spoke to several young people who chose to approach him and share reminisces of their friends.
Marc Dumas said he lost seven friends, but was particularly close to Daniel Hains. "It doesn't matter if I was doing good or bad. Dan was always there to help me out," he said.
As others joined the conversation, a picture emerged of how the school had lost its centre, how those dead were some of the school's most popular boys. Many played several sports and all were well known throughout the city and beyond.
There was a poignant tale of a life interrupted. One of the dead boys and his girlfriend had recently split up. Before he left for Moncton Friday, he slipped a note into her locker expressing hope they could get back together. The girl only found it on Saturday, when she joined the grieving throngs at BHS.
"Everybody's like a big family at BHS," Dumas said. "I've never seen people like this. It's hurt so many people."
When the group, by this time grown to 15 or 20, almost all young men, were complimented on how they were holding up at that moment, Corey Scott said, "We've got no more tears left."By then, 18 hours had passed since the accident and almost 36 hours since most had last slept, and the raw emotion began to boil over.
While most wanted to continue telling a wider world about the friends they had lost, a few young men who joined the conversation suddenly became extremely agitated by the presence of a reporter, making it impossible for the tributes for their peers to continue.
For the people of Bathurst who couldn't or wouldn't articulate their grief, their mayor rose to the challenge of speaking for them. Mayor Stephen Brunet, a career teacher, eloquently took the lead for his community, even as he grieved for friends and sympathized with the suffering of his neighbours the Lords. He said Saturday was just a blur, but reality was setting in on Sunday."When we lost our mill, I thought that would be the hardest thing we ever faced," he said Sunday, "but that was nothing like this."
Perhaps because the city has withstood other adversity over the years, like the closure of the Smurfit-Stone Paper Mill and the loss of almost 300 jobs, life did in fact go on for many in the city this weekend. For all the grief seen in Bathurst, and it was vast, it was not total as many media reports in the past 48 hours have suggested.
Many families enjoyed a day of sledding on the partly sunny Saturday afternoon, a day so glorious for January it was hard to believe what heartbreak the weather had caused just the night before.
People still shopped for groceries and ran errands. The city may only have a population of 12,000 but it is the retail centre of a wider region with a population closer to 50,000.
At Wal-Mart, shoppers smiled and joked with friends they ran into. What was different though was how often people in the midst of hearty, happy conversations would catch themselves, look shyly around and lower their voices.
While Bathurst may be a bustling city for its size, and while at times things may have seemed almost normal this weekend, there is no question a painful inescapable fact hung over every moment.
"We think we belong to a big community, but today we realize how very small we are." Father Culligan told his congregation, in a message similar to those delivered at churches throughout the region Sunday morning. "Everybody has been affected and most of us devastated by what has befallen us
Mimi
New Member
and more...
http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/front/article/181954
http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/front/article/181944
http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/front/article/181943
http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/front/article/181940
Facebook link:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8714397034 For The Boy's in Red - Other Areas
http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/front/article/181954
http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/front/article/181944
http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/front/article/181943
http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/front/article/181940
Facebook link:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8714397034 For The Boy's in Red - Other Areas