The whole city is crying

The whole city is crying

Anne Arseneault stood on the edge of the highway in the crisp, winter sunshine outside this heartbroken city Sunday, and wept.

"Those poor little boys," she cried. "God wanted them. They're all angels now."

In the ditch beside the asphalt, a scar of dirt and bloodstained snow are all that remain of the terrible Friday night accident that injured Arseneault's grandson Brad, and killed seven teammates from the Bathurst High School Phantoms senior basketball squad.

Brad Arseneault and another player survived the tragedy with broken bones. So did Katie Lord, a Grade 12 student at the school who had accompanied the team on its road trip last week to play a game in Moncton, two hours away.

The fourth survivor was Katie's father Wayne Lord, the Phantoms' much-respected coach, who was driving the passenger van in difficult weather when it veered into the left-hand lane and collided with an oncoming transport truck.

The accident also killed Lord's wife Beth, a well-known and widely loved mathematics and music teacher who had worked at schools across northern New Brunswick.

While eight families here now grieve the loss of children and loved ones, Anne Arseneault's family carries the trauma of feeling relief that their own boy survived the crash, while eight others were not so lucky.

"Oh my God we won the lotto we did," said Arseneault. "No money can buy the life we got yesterday. But then you think of the others, and you're sick to your soul."

It could have been worse. Three members of the basketball team were too sick to make the journey to Moncton. Another boy, Brad Arseneault's older brother Cal, quit the team in November to focus on his studies in the months leading up to Grade 12 graduation.

"Cal could have been in that van," said Arseneault. "He's taking this really hard. Two of the boys who died were his best friends in the world.

"The whole city is crying. I stand here and look at the flowers and the little candle there in the snow, and I just can't imagine that those boys are gone."

Along with Beth Lord, the dead include Nathan Cleland, 17, Javier Acevedo, 17, Codey Branch, 17, Justin Cormier, 17, Daniel Hains, 17, Nicholas Kelly, 15, and Nick Quinn, who turned 16 on Saturday.

Arseneault says the team had just finished singing Happy Birthday to Quinn inside the van after midnight -- and was only minutes away from the McDonald's restaurant in Bathurst where parents of the boys were waiting -- when the crash occurred.

Half-an-hour later, the parents were asked to go to the hospital instead. They watched as four survivors were carried out of ambulances on stretchers, and were then told the other passengers were dead.

At the crash site Sunday, a folded, brown-paper Tim Horton's bag was placed in the snow and inscribed with a simple tribute: "Javi -- we love you and we miss you. Love, your family."

Pilgrims came all day to the site, parking their cars on the shoulder of the road and gazing at a makeshift shrine of flowers, photographs -- and a pair of portable basketball nets erected by students from Bathurst High.

source: http://www.canada.com/reginaleaderpost