Students Return To School In Bathurst, New Brunswick After 7 Classmates Killed In Horrific Accident

It was supposed to be a normal day back at school for staff and students at Bathurst High School in Bathurst, New Brunswick on Monday.

It was anything but.

Both kids and teachers returned to class with broken hearts, after a devastating van crash took the lives of seven members of the school’s basketball team and the wife of their coach, the man who was driving the vehicle. The car is believed to have skidded on slippery roads early Saturday as the group was returning from an out-of-town tournament in Moncton and slammed into an oncoming tractor-trailer.

Only four people survived the terrible impact which tore the van – and ultimately the entire town – apart. Students returned to grief counsellors and some very empty seats, with many in the tight-knit community wondering how they would make it through the day, much less the next few weeks.

An appropriate makeshift memorial – a basketball net – sits silent blowing in the breeze at the scene of the mishap, mute testimony to the carnage that took place there just a few days ago.

School superintendent John McLaughlin visited the quiet campus on Monday to find a not surprisingly sombre atmosphere that was relieved by some levity as classmates recalled good times with their lost friends.

“Very early this morning, there were a lot of tears in there and a lot of hugs and a lot of people who were just really needing support,” he relates. “It got very quiet after that. When the classes began you could have heard a pin drop in that school.

“And now I just walked by a classroom and popped in with some kids and they’re watching some YouTube videos of some of these boys and some friends they’re missing and there’s some a lot of laughter and it’s really wonderful to hear some laughter beginning to return to the halls of that school.”

McLaughlin acknowledges the healing will be a long time in coming but congratulates the students on their courage to return to the school after such a terrible tragedy. “I think they’re coping the best way they can,” he reminds. “Everybody grieves differently in different ways.”

Most of the school is expected to turn out for the students’ funerals at the local civic centre on Wednesday. A service for the coach’s wife will be held the next day.

Mechanics spent the day rebuilding the 15-seat van. Police are trying to determine whether it suffered a mechanical failure but admit there’s no indication that anything was wrong with the vehicle.

You can leave a tribute for the boys on one of the Facebook groups set up in their memory.

Photo courtesy Facebook