Accident
| Deaths |
| 1. Javier Acevedo, age 17 |
| 2. Codey Branch, age 17 |
| 3. Nathan Cleland, age 17 |
| 4. Justin Cormier, age 17 |
| 5. Daniel Hains, age 17 |
| 6. Nick Kelly, age 16 |
| 7. Elizabeth "Beth" Lord, age 51 |
| 8. Nickolas Quinn, age 16 |
The accident occurred on New Brunswick Route 8 shortly after midnight on January 12, 2008, when the team coach was driving the Bathurst High School basketball team northward back from a game in Moncton against the Moncton High School Purple Knights in an E350 Ford Club Wagon. Light freezing rain and low visibility created poor, slippery driving conditions. As the van approached the Bathurst city limits, the coach lost control and veered in front of a southbound semi-trailer truck. The truck collided with the side of the van and the two vehicles came to rest on the shoulder of the southbound lane of the highway approximately 40 metres (130 ft) from the point of impact.
The police officer who discovered the wreck initially suspected that only the semi had gone off the road. After further investigation, he found the van and called for emergency services, whose arrival was delayed by freezing rain. The rear wall and a large portion of the right-hand side of the van, including three rows of seats, had been torn away, ejecting several occupants. Seven players and the wife of the team coach were pronounced dead at the scene. The coach, his daughter and the two other players survived the accident and were rushed to Chaleur Regional Hospital in Bathurst. Of the injured, one was listed in critical condition, and two in stable. The fourth was released shortly after the accident. The driver of the truck was not injured.
Read more about this topic: Boys In Red Accident
Famous quotes containing the word accident:
“We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)