Canada mourns school basketball team loss

Sri Lankan News.Net
Monday 14th January, 2008

There has been an outpouring of grief across Canada following a tragic road accident that decimated a school basketball team.

The drama played out just after midnight on Saturday as the Bathurst High School varsity team was returning home after an away game.

Bathurst is a town of just 12,700 people in New Brunswick, Canada, and is a tightly-knit community. Disaster struck however when the 15-passenger mini van carrying the team and the coach on an icy road in heavy snow, zig-zagged across the centre line and collided with a semi-trailer.

Such was the impact that one side of the van and all the seats were ripped away.

Seven members of the basketball team, boys aged 15 to seventeen, were killed, along with the coach's wife, who like her husband, was a teacher at the school.

'When members arrived at the scene all eight victims were dead,' said New Brunswick RCMP spokesman Sgt. Derek Strong, calling the crash scene 'indescribable.'

'There was nothing we could do,' he said.

'The roads were quite icy, and it was a matter of the driver losing control at the wrong time. I want to make it clear to everyone that at this time we do not suspect any illegal activity on behalf of either driver. It's a collision because of the weather.'

A spokesperson for Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he had sent a note of condolence to the school's principal.

School district superintendent John McLaughlin said the crash was, 'a tragedy of unthinkable proportions,' while Bathurst mayor Stephen Brunet said, 'We are a city in mourning. 'We're still in a state of shock.'

The bus was just five minutes from home where parents were waiting to pick their sons up at the local McDonalds. One parent had received a call saying the bus was approaching the Bathurst exit, and they would be there in 5 minutes.

The team was returning on Highway 11 from playing a game in Moncton, about 220 kilometres to the south of Bathurst.

When the bus did not arrive parents began to worry. They then received a call saying there had been an accident and they should go to the hospital.

At the hospital ambulances started to arrive with the injured. There were three. The bus was carrying twelve people.

Then police arrived with the heartbreaking news that 8 of the passengers on the bus had died at the scene.

Throughout the weekend tributes have poured in from across the country in support of the students and teacher who died. Grief Counselors were working full time at the school, which has about 800 students. Friends of those that died erected two basketball hoops on stands at the scene of the crash on Sunday.

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