Five years ago, Bathurst was rocked by tragedy. Today, those in the

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58 SPORTSNET
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Photo Credit tK
the boys in red big read
Photo Credit tK
big read the boys in red
Clockwise from top left:
Quinn, Cormier,
Acevedo, Kelly, Cleland,
Branch, Hains
SPORTSNET 59
big read the boys in red
B
Bradd Arseneau didn’t ask for any of this.
Not the personal note from Steve Nash, the
breakfast with Chris Bosh or the chance
to star in his own Gatorade commercial.
He could have done without the headlines
declaring him a hero, the letters that poured
in from across the nation. He’s grateful, of
course. And, yes, he deserved every bit.
But if Bradd could just close his eyes and
wake up in a world where that van made
it home, he’d give it all back.
Right now, though, the skinny, mophaired, intensely private 20-year-old is just
looking for a little bit of space so he can get
his human sexuality paper on PMS done.
He’s sitting at a computer in the corner of
his parents’ dining room, and no one will
leave him alone. “I could give him lots of
great details,” his mom, Peggy, laughs. “I
could too,” says his dad, Randy. Bradd just
shakes his head at the banter, pushes his
bare feet into the floor and spins his chair
back to the computer screen. In a couple of
hours, they’ll all sit down together in a room
filled with photographs of the teammates
who basically grew up in this house, and
whose laughter echoes in every story Peggy
shares about the weekend sleepovers,
paintball wars, goofy homemade videos
and Guitar Hero marathons that made these
boys a part of their family. The Arseneaus
will sit with their memories as they watch
a movie being broadcast across Canada
about the team Bradd led to a provincial
championship just a year after it seemed
like the laughter would never return.
Tonight, Bathurst, N.B., falls silent.
Throughout this idyllic seaside town, doors
60 SPORTSNET
the boys in red big read
kids arrive to fill the jerseys of the boys
who came before. Teams play on, win
championships, raise banners and graduate into life beyond the school’s walls. The
connection to the past grows weaker with
each new season. Still, the Boys in Red
linger, viscerally for some—the new reality of a fractured, haunted place. This is
Bathurst five years after the moment
everything changed.
he Phantoms were famished after
falling 75–65 to the Moncton High
Purple Knights that Friday evening in 2008. The nine players
who made the trip invaded the
food court at the nearby mall after the game
before climbing into the school’s white
15-passenger van to make the three-hour
trip to Bathurst. Freezing rain and slush
covered the route home, and there was talk
of staying the night in a hotel. But the Phantoms needed a solid rest in their own beds
to be ready for the next day’s game against
Riverdale, the division’s top team, so it
was decided they’d press on. The Moncton
match was an embarrassing loss for
Bathurst, who had beaten the Purple
Knights by almost 30 points earlier in the
season. The lackadaisical performance was
a sore point for Wayne Lord—an X’s and
O’s coach who’d led the Phantoms from the
sidelines for more than two decades. Tim
Daley fouled out in typical Tim Daley fashion—an undersized five-foot-nine post
player with overaggressive elbows. By the
end of the game, most of the starters had
joined him on the bench. They roared when
Bradd, then a Grade 11 forward, chased
down a Purple Knight on a break and
blocked him emphatically. Lord hushed
their cheers with a scolding glare.
Lord’s wife, Beth, was in the front seat
of the van. She’d made the trip to Moncton
with their daughter Katie to drop off a car
for their eldest daughter, who lived there.
Katie, a Grade 12 student at BHS, took a
seat in the second row, next to a pile of gym
bags. The boys raced to find their spots—
Codey Branch, the team’s six-foot-five star
centre, beat Tim to the back seat, where
he sat next to his friends Justin Cormier
and Nathan Cleland. Daniel “Big D” Hains,
the team’s gentle giant, sat in the next row
beside Javier “Latino Heat” Acevedo and
15-year-old Nikki Kelly, one of two Grade
10 students on the senior team. Nick Quinn,
also in Grade 10, was in the row in front of
them beside Tim and Bradd.
Bradd put in his earbuds and turned on
a collection of soft songs on his iPod, hoping
to catch some sleep—a bold move on a team
prone to drawing health class diagrams on
the faces of dreamers. The van would fall
quiet for short periods as it rolled down the
highway, then be interrupted by bursts of
teenage laughter. Bradd rested his head
back on the seat, half joining conversations,
T
a reluctant hero
Arseneau, now 20, was the only returning player
the year after the accident. He led the team to the
championship title and then quit the game.
are locked and phones go unanswered as
families huddle on their couches to watch
a made-for-TV film that fictionalizes the
very real tragedy that has come to define
this place. Some don’t watch at all. A father
braces for midnight, when his son’s birthday arrives again—and again his son isn’t
there. In a near-empty house, a mother
walks into her son’s bedroom, crawls under
his covers and cries. Just blocks away, a
coach’s burden remains a mystery.
It’s been five years since a school van
carrying the Bathurst Phantoms senior
boys basketball team collided with a
freight truck on a slushy night, just minutes from home. The crash killed eight
people—seven players and the coach’s
wife. Four survived: two players, the
coach, who was driving, and his 17-yearold daughter. Reminders of the accident
are everywhere in this friendly bilingual
town, which hugs a harbour flowing into
Chaleur Bay. A basketball net with photos
of the dead encased in a glass blackboard
sits near the site of the crash, passed by
everyone who leaves and enters town.
There are small tributes inside Bathurst
High School, where a vault in the basement holds boxes of letters that arrived
from around the world after the accident.
Seven blocks of red granite form a circle
in a new park dedicated to the Boys in
Red, just down the street from the school,
across from the post office that serves the
12,000 people who live here. For the families and close friends of those who died,
the day remains Jan. 12, 2008—always
there, stretching on. But at the same time,
this town moves inevitably forward. New
half drifting off as “Everlong” by the Foo
Fighters played on his iPod:
If everything could ever feel this real
forever. If anything could ever be this
good again.
About 45 minutes from home, the boys
started calling their parents to let them
know when the team would arrive at the
local McDonald’s, their usual drop-off spot.
There was loud music playing—Codey and
his dad, Dale, could hardly hear each other;
the conversation was short and ended
without the brief “love you” that usually
replaced “goodbye.” At midnight, the van
erupted with a chorus of “Happy Birthday”
for Nick, now 16. The song echoed in John
Cleland’s ear through the phone as his son,
Nathan, told him they were almost home.
Bradd closed his eyes, leaning his head
back, one earbud out. Tim and Nick argued
with Katie, saying figure skating isn’t really
a sport.
12:05—Falling snow rushed against the
windshield of the van as it cruised at a
little more than 70 km/h.
12:06—The van passed the “Welcome to
Bathurst” sign on the side of icy Route 8.
12:07—Wayne saw the lights of a freight
truck peek over the edge of the hill just
before the cutoff into town. The van hit
the slushy gravel on the right shoulder and
then swerved left, sliding sideways into
the opposite lane. Tim shouted. Bradd
opened his eyes.
12:08—White lights filled the night.
The van was ripped in half, a twisted
wreck in the ditch. The freight truck was
sideways, turned from a desperate attempt
to avoid the crash. Bradd lay on his back,
half in the van, half out, looking into the
midnight sky. Tim couldn’t feel the pain of
his broken pelvis or his shattered wrist.
Just frantic adrenalin. He lay in the snow.
Katie was in front of him. He grabbed her
hand and found Bradd by the van. “I love
you man,” Bradd said. Tim held them both
and prayed:
Our father who art in heaven, hallowed
be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will
be done…
Not a religious kid, but it was the only
help he could find. The driver of the
18-wheeler covered Bradd’s shoeless feet
with a sweater from his bag. Tim led Katie
to a truck that pulled over to help. They
sat in the back and Tim used the driver’s
cell to call his parents: “There’s been an
accident. Meet me at the hospital.” He lay
back in the warmth, feeling safe—telling
himself it would all be fine. And then the
pain hit: “Shit. I’m not all right.”
he parents gathered in a waiting
room, a collection of lives about to
be shattered forever. The nurses
tried to answer their frantic questions, but had little information.
One had a name written on a yellow piece
of paper. She asked for Bradd’s parents.
Fast news is always the worst, they
T
in memoriam
Teams that pass the site of the accident leave
medals and balls to honour the boys; parents of
the deceased maintain the memorial regularly
thought. But they were wrong.
The principal showed up. The superintendent. The school counsellor. Classmates
crowded outside, more and more packing
in, frantically trying to find out which boys
were alive and which were dead. Dale
Branch asked the nurse with the yellow
paper to check for his son’s name: “Codey
Branch,” he said, pointing to the paper, as
though he could will it there. The nurse just
shook her head. “When are the rest of the
ambulances coming in?” asked Ginette
Emond, Codey’s mom, bewildered that only
a few had arrived. “They are all in,” the
nurse replied softly, hiding the quiver in
her voice. “Then send more!” Ginette said.
“Why don’t you send more?” The nurse
paused. “I’m sorry. All the ambulances are
in,” she said. “The coroner is on the scene.”
But Ginette couldn’t understand. “You have
to send more ambulances,” she cried. “Send
more. Please, send more.”
It took two hours before the names of
the dead were read by the coroner—a man
who refereed some of the boys when they
were younger and who played basketball
against them during school alumni games.
His hands shook and he tried to look away
from the parents. At the site of the crash,
he had walked up to each of the police
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big read the boys in red
officers and firefighters who had stood
beside the bodies until he arrived. He had
crouched beside each and declared them
dead. One by one, he read their names.
With each, parents collapsed and wept.
rista Quinn and Ginette Emond
sit around a dining room table,
laughing. Partly because it helps
keep them from crying, and partly
because of how odd it is to reflect
on what the past five years have been like.
During the year after the accident, Krista
pulled a baseball cap low over her forehead
to disguise herself when she went to her
local grocery store, unable to bear the sympathetic sea of people that parted as she
entered. Ginette found herself unable to
shop for groceries at all—falling into a fit
at the sight of clam chowder, one of
Codey’s favourites. She’d leave her cart
and come back hours later to claim it. Krista
tried baking her oatmeal chocolate-chip
cookies, but she kept waiting for Nick to
bound up the basement stairs yelling,
“Hey, cookies!” and snag one fresh out of
the oven. Ginette kept replaying her argument with Codey about allowing him to
transfer from the area’s French high school
to Bathurst in Grade 12 to play for the better basketball program. Krista found herself
trying to garden, but would get stuck staring at a single flower, unable to look away.
That year, news of the new basketball
season was difficult to take—the team and
the school rolling on without their boys.
Bradd was the only player to return. The
Phantoms played down a division, but every
game seemed to carry the weight of a playoff match. And for Krista, at least, it became
a strange sort of comfort. “Nick and Nikki
both would have been on that team,” she
says, meaning her son and Nikki Kelly, the
other Grade 10 student from the Boys in
Red. “They would have been starters.”
The new Phantoms persevered despite
the distraction of national media attention
and the stress of watching their new coach,
Alan Doucet, suffer a heart attack during
practice in the days leading up to the
regional finals. When Bathurst made it to
the provincial championship game, with
Doucet recovering in a hospital bed, the
town was thrust into the spotlight again.
Krista made the trip to Fredericton as
though her son were on that floor. Ginette
came too, and they stayed at the same
hotel as the team. They sat in the stands,
cheering and crying, as Bradd led the
Phantoms with 25 points and 21 rebounds
to win the AA championship. Afterwards,
Krista and Ginette lined up in the hallway
of the hotel with the other parents and
friends, giving the players high-fives.
“Everyone was just ecstatic,” Ginette says.
“For me, it was a mix; it was everything
all at once—there were three teams on
that court. You could feel it.”
K
62 SPORTSNET
On the drive back to Bathurst, both
moms noticed the signs and billboards—
“Go Phantoms Go”—which had now
replaced the “Rest in Peace Phantoms”
signs that had hung in place for nearly a
year. “I remember feeling sad,” Krista says.
“It was just weird; I was thinking, it’s not
all about us anymore.” Not that she wanted
it to be—but she realized that time would
move forward, and no amount of joy could
fully pull her with it.
sabelle Hains answers the phone
with a soft Maritime accent. “I
said all I could on that.” She hangs
up on another reporter. They’ve
been calling all week about the
movie she vehemently opposed. She walks
out of her kitchen, past a white electric
candle with a red ribbon that glows faintly
in the window. Isabelle never turns it off.
It’s as important to her as the photographs
that line the walls of her living room, forming a giant collage. Daniel’s face is everywhere, always with the same grin, his
patchy goatee tracing a U on his round
baby face. A family portrait taken the
I
“the pain is always there”
Isabelle Hains sits in Daniel’s room, still crowded
with his guitars, shoes and posters. Isabelle wants
all school boards to ban 15-passenger vans.
December before the accident hangs in
her hallway. Isabelle had flowing red hair
and soft, round cheeks then. Her cheeks
are thin and her eyes are tired now. The
lines of her face slope, like her shoulders,
under an unseen weight.
Last night, while the movie aired, Isabelle
walked down the stairs to the basement of
her bungalow and pushed open the door
to Daniel’s bedroom. It remains just as he
left it—Jimi Hendrix and Metallica posters
still taped to the wall. The guitars that used
to blast his band’s practices out to the
street are packed in cases in the corner.
The wooden dresser is still covered in
smiley-face and Batman stickers, and
remains cluttered with a teenage boy’s
essential toiletries: shaving cream, Axe
deodorant and a bottle of Febreze. The suits
and jerseys she sewed extra fabric into to
make sure they fit still hang in the closet.
continued on p. 80
big read the boys in red
continued FRoM p. 62
His black Everlast punching bag leans in
the corner, with his grey and red size-13
Reebok basketball shoes resting on top. It’s
the same pair he lent to Codey Branch when
the star centre forgot to bring his own to
an away game against James Hill High in
Miramichi. Daniel sat on the bench in his
socks while Codey played. That’s just the
kind of kid he was—and besides, basketball
wasn’t even his sport. The scuffed-up rugby
cleats on his bedside table were less likely
to be shared. It was his first year on the
basketball team. “I’m going to play every
sport this year,” he told Isabelle in the fall
of his Grade 12 year. She stood in his room
and remembered the way he used to wrap
his massive arms around her—hugs so big
they made her feel like a little girl.
Today, she sits on the couch and flips
through a folder that documents her fiveyear cross-country campaign for school
boards to have tighter regulations for travel
and to have 15-passenger vans banned
outright. She’s memorized the details of
the white van’s safety inspections—she
can tell you just how bald its all-season
tires were and where the rust on its frame
had festered. She’s found other bus drivers
who were on the same route that night but
pulled over in the freezing rain. She can
rhyme off all 24 safety recommendations
for team travel taken from the findings of
an inquest into the accident in May 2009.
Isabelle launched a website with two other
mothers of the Boys in Red. While the others have become less involved, Isabelle’s
efforts have cost her close to $30,000. “I’m
not going halfway with this. Even if it takes
another three, four years or longer,” she
says. “I’m getting justice for my son.”
Still, Isabelle realizes what she’s really
looking for is gone. She can’t bring him
home. “I can’t say it’s helping me any,” she
says. She grew up in this town—went to
Bathurst High herself—but now she only
feels comfortable grocery shopping early
in the morning or late at night. She feels
the stares, the angst of a town that seems
anxious to move on and is tired of her constant fight. Her husband, Allan, left nine
days before the accident for a job in Fort
McMurray, Alta. She told him the news on
the phone from the hospital and heard him
cry out in pain. He’s rarely been back since.
“A loss of a child can bring a family together
80 SPORTSNET
or make it drift apart,” she says. Last summer, the couple decided to separate.
The Christmas decorations have stayed
boxed up since Daniel died. Isabelle hasn’t
put up a proper gravestone yet; she can’t
find the perfect words. And she can’t go
near the school she drove him to that morning, calling him back to the family’s grey
minivan because he’d forgotten his basketball gear in the back seat. “Be careful
tonight,” she said. “They’re calling for bad
weather.” “Don’t worry,” Daniel told her.
“If it gets bad, we’re going to stay there.”
There’s a “For Sale” sign on Isabelle’s
front lawn—the only way she can leave this
haunted place behind. But then, she says,
that seems unlikely. “You can’t deal with
the death of your son. There’s nothing you
can do,” she says softly through tears. “The
pain is always there. It ruins your life.”
rief manifests in many ways. It
can consume you, it can change
you. Inevitably, it becomes part
of you. And, eventually, you learn
to cope, carrying that void with
you in your own broken way. You can see
it all over Bathurst.
John Cleland sits in an empty coffee
shop, flipping pages of a photo album,
travelling through memories of his old life.
It’s nearly freezing, but he’s wearing shorts
and an Under Armour T-shirt. His grey
handlebar moustache twitches when he
talks. In old Christmas portraits of the family dressed as the Addams Family or the
Blues Brothers, John’s face is thicker, his
moustache a dark brown.
Over the course of several coffees, John
shows photos of Nathan in action on volleyball and basketball courts. He had the
best vertical in the school, even though
he was a five-foot-nine setter and point
guard—and no one in the province could
touch his speed on the court or on a soccer
pitch. John shares stories of school projects, camping trips, Nathan’s devotion to
the Montreal Canadiens. He recalls the
Grade 9 student who came up to him after
the accident and told him that Nathan
always went out of his way to talk to him
during lunch, when he was sitting alone.
And he laughs when he thinks of the Habs
lunch box Nathan still carried to school in
Grade 12. Probably would have taken it
with him when he graduated and studied
to be a firefighter.
An English teacher at Bathurst High,
John knew every boy on the team. He can
still picture them in his classroom; can see
them in the halls. And even though he and
his wife are close friends with the Arseneaus, they still can’t visit their home
because it’s too painful. But John will
always take time to talk about his son, to
dream of what he would have become.
“It’s when people don’t talk about them
that it hurts,” he says. “It’s as if they didn’t
G
toGether in GrieF
Krista Quinn, left, and Ginette Emond became
close friends after the accident. They took some
solace from the Phantoms’ win in 2009.
exist, and that’s not true.”
He still finds himself sitting in Nathan’s
bedroom, which, like Daniel’s and many of
the others’, is untouched from the day he
died. And every spring he makes his way
to the memorial that marks the site of the
accident. He puts fresh red mulch at the
base of the basketball net he and the other
fathers put there, laying a three-foot foundation of cement beneath. They tidy the
medals left by passing teams and clear out
the basketballs that pile up in front—always
leaving just eight in a neat row. They keep
the memory alive, John says, with all the
joy and pain that brings. Slowly, he says,
he and his wife are learning to let go of the
physical reminders. A few months ago, they
burned Nathan’s Phantoms jacket, after
carefully removing the “bench warmer”
patch from the sleeve and the ironic cheerleading badge he wore on the chest. “We’re
considering burning it all,” John says. “He
would have liked that—warrior style.”
John glances to his right as a couple
walks into the coffee shop, and his face
goes white. “That’s Wayne right there.
The coach,” he says, pausing. “It’s the first
time I’ve seen him in probably two years.”
Wayne Lord is with his new wife, whom
he married this year. They walk to the
counter, buy a coffee and walk back out
the door. The coach glances back at John
briefly without saying a word. John says
he holds no anger toward the coach, and
can’t imagine what he’s gone through. “I
don’t know how it is for him to wake up
every day under those circumstances,” he
says quietly.
big read the boys in red
Wayne Lord has never spoken publicly
about the accident, aside from participating in the coroner’s inquest. “Look, I can’t,”
he says over the phone shortly after stopping in the coffee shop. “I haven’t said a
word and I’m not about to. I’m sorry. I’m
going to stay true to myself. I made that
decision a long time ago—and I’m not
going to change it. Thank you.”
More than 700 people showed up for
Beth Lord’s memorial service, held separately from the boys’. She was remembered
as a dedicated teacher with nearly three
decades of experience who filled the halls
of the local elementary school with the
music of the youth choir she led. But when
it comes to the memorials in Bathurst,
including the new park opening in the
spring, the mention is always of the Boys
in Red, not Beth. A friend said it was
Wayne’s decision to keep her tribute separate—a private memory, honoured quietly.
Despite his silence, the coach has kept
his connection to the Phantoms. He’s often
in the stands at local games. Tim Daley,
who recently became a police officer, ran
into him at Walmart a few weeks back. They
stood in the aisle and chatted for nearly half
an hour, filling in the gaps from when they
saw each other last. Tim remains good
friends with Wayne’s daughter, Katie, who
was his classmate. He and Wayne have
met several times over the past five years—
sharing a beer, talking basketball—but they
never talk about the past. “It’s not his fault.
It’s nobody’s fault—it’s just a bad thing
that happened,” Tim says. “He knows that.
I hope he knows, anyway.”
Tim often stops by the Arseneaus’ house
when he comes down to Bathurst from his
home in Jacquet River, 30 minutes north.
And sometimes when he leaves, he drives
down the road to Notre Dame du Rosaire
Catholic church, where his seven teammates are buried in a row. He thinks back
to that night in the hospital, the morphine
numbing his pain, denial keeping his hope
alive. “It can’t be that bad, it can’t be that
bad,” he thought, over and over again.
“They’ll be fine. This kind of stuff doesn’t
happen to us.” He remembers the moment
his dad sat down beside him in his hospital bed and told him seven of his friends
were dead. And the words John Cleland
said when he walked in the room that day:
“We’re so happy you’re still here.” Tim
stands by their graves and remembers
them all: Javier, Codey, Nathan, Justin,
Daniel, Nikki and Nick, the names all
etched on the band of his watch and their
photos lining the inside of his police cap.
And he thinks of Beth, too—buried across
town, in a cemetery on the edge of a field,
with fresh blue and white flowers and an
angel sitting on top, with a silver heart
ornament resting on it: “Beth, Mom.”
When he leaves this month for northern
Alberta to begin his new post with the
82 SPORTSNET
a town’s tribute
Seven blocks of granite form a circle in a new park
Bathurst has dedicated to the Boys in Red;
John and Sandra Cleland with their daughter,
Emily (on Skype), and dog, Buddy, in their home
RCMP, Tim will carry them still. “The bonds
you make on a sports team, the life lessons—you don’t really know how important
those moments are until they’re gone,” he
says. “I don’t regret being part of this group.
I’d do it all over again.”
radd Arseneau hasn’t played basketball since leading Bathurst to
a provincial title a year after the
accident. “I dedicated that year
to the Boys and then said, ‘I’m
just going to hang it up,’” he says. The
movie, based on that team, flickers through
the Arseneaus’ dark living room lined with
photos of the team. Justin and Nathan are
in almost all of them—they were like siblings to Bradd and his older brother, Cal,
who had quit the team before the accident.
As far as Bradd’s concerned, the movie is
fine because it helped him and his family
and others in this community work through
some scars. (Krista Quinn and Ginette
Emond played minor roles in the film. Noah
Quinn, Krista’s youngest son, who helped
Bathurst High win the provincial AAA
championship in 2011, played on the team
that faced the fictionalized Phantoms in
the final.) Throughout the movie, Bradd
gets up to check Facebook, as a steady
stream of posts of support appear on his
wall. He stays up late into the night, sitting
at the computer in the dining room, finishing his paper on PMS. He doesn’t sleep
well anyway—it’s the quiet moments that
bring it all back for him. He recently
B
emailed himself a quote he’d heard. “It’s
about boxing up vulnerable parts of yourself and just kind of tossing them away,”
he says. “You have to find them again at
some point or another. To fully overcome
something, you have to go back and pick
up those parcels. That’s what some people
do. Others think you can carry it forever.”
Like so many people connected to the
Boys in Red, Bradd carries those parcels
with him. And just like them, he’s still
learning how to unpack the things he’s
boxed. Throughout Bathurst there are
untouched bedrooms, unfinished graves,
unbaked cookies—and a day that stretches
on, never ending, never changing.
Early the next morning, Peggy drives
Bradd back to Fredericton, where he’s in
his final year at the University of New
Brunswick. He doesn’t have his driver’s
licence yet; had just turned 16 a month
before the accident. They leave Bathurst
along Route 8—like they always do—passing the roadside memorial. He sleeps for
most of the ride after that. Maybe he
unpacks something along the way. Hard
to know, even for him—these things don’t
come with ribbons. Maybe he’ll sort
through another box this Jan. 12, when he
slips quietly into the cold and stares up at
the night sky, as he does every year on
that day. There, alone, he finds his friends
in the stars and speaks to each of them.
“As foolish as it sounds, it helps me get
through it,” he says. “I’m happy when I’m
out there talking to them—they’re with
me no matter what. That’s something I’ll
carry for the rest of my life.”
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