Shocked families deal with unthinkable error
THE ERROR IS UNIMAGINABLE. ONE BOY, THOUGHT DEAD, IS ALIVE. ANOTHER, THOUGHT ALIVE, IS DEAD.
It is such an exquisitely sweet detail, boyish and endearing and wrenching all at once.
In their Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League playoff fever, the Humboldt Broncos had not only dyed their hair bright blond, but also had painted their toenails in alternating team colours, yellow-greenyellow.
Xavier Labelle and Parker Tobin were both about six feet tall, and according to their online player profiles, weighed within five pounds of one another. They were both 18. And they both had the bright hair and painted toenails.
And yet this delightful silliness may have contributed to the dreadful mistake that emerged Monday, first in a Saskatchewan RCMP news release and later in a press briefing by a Saskatchewan Justice spokesman.
Two of the players in the catastrophic crash last Friday had been misidentified — the wrong names attached respectively to the wrong person and body.
Of 29 people on the Broncos’ bus when it collided with a semi-trailer about 5 p.m. that day at a rural intersection north of Humboldt, 15 died, 10 of them players and five team officials, including head coach Darcy Haugan, assistant coach Mark Cross and play-by-play announcer Tyler Bieber.
All but one of the survivors — player Nick Shumlanski was released Sunday — remain in hospital, four in critical or lifethreatening condition and four in serious condition. Several are in comas.
The mistake involved Labelle, who was officially declared dead, and Tobin, who was identified as among the survivors.
For two days, the Labelle family — well, actually two families, because Labelle was boarding with a loving billet family, Rene and Devin Cannon, in Humboldt — was plunged into the deepest despair, believing they had suffered the loss of a child.
On Sunday, Xavier’s big brother Isaac posted a picture of the two of them on Instagram, saying they were “best friends, teammates, allies, brothers … I love you so much and I’m sorry.”
Monday, Isaac posted again for the first time since his brother’s announced “death,” saying, “All I can say is miracles do exist. My deepest condolences to the Tobin family.”
The emotional rollercoaster the family endured was also hinted at in social media posts by Xavier’s billet mother, Rene Cannon.
On Sunday, she posted a picture of the three Broncos who had lived with her and who, she was told, had perished in the crash. “Goodbye my sweet sons,” she wrote, with three broken hearts.
Monday, she tweeted a picture of Xavier, and said, “We know that our ray of light is someone else’s shattering darkness. Our hearts are still broken at the loss of two of our boys and for the other family and billet family involved. We are grateful for the gift of being able to say all the words we thought we’d never say.”
The Tobin parents, originally from Newfoundland but now living in Alberta, would have gone through the same terrible whipsaw, but in reverse.
On Saturday, Parker’s mother Rhonda Clarke Tobin tweeted, “This is one of the hardest posts I have ever had to make. Parker is stable at the moment and is being airlifted to Saskatoon hospital. Thank you for all your kind words and messages. Please continue to pray for his Humboldt family.”
She has posted nothing since.
Justice Ministry spokesman Drew Wilby, who met briefly with reporters in Saskatoon Monday, said the families were involved in the identification process, with a representative of the Labelle family “able to be at the makeshift morgue” that was set up last Saturday at a Saskatoon hospital.
In direct reply to a question about whether the Tobin family had been at the bedside of someone “they believed to be their son for a couple of days,” Wilby said only, “I can’t say, but Parker’s family has been in Saskatoon, yes.”
According to Jennifer Graham, senior spokeswoman for the ministry, identification was done through “a process involving the coroners, partner agencies (among them, presumably, the RCMP) and the families involved.”
Asked in an email why coroners didn’t use either dental records or DNA in a mass casualty situation that was by many accounts one of utter devastation, she said, “The primary concern was to identify the deceased and ensure the families had the information they required in a timely manner.”
But two families, of course, got precisely the wrong information.
Graham said the ministry learned from the hospital “late last night (Sunday)” that “information came to light” indicating “a mistake had been made …”
Hospital officials, who held a briefing late Monday, refused to discuss the mistake at all, referring reporters to the Justice Ministry.
Unmentioned by either Justice or hospital officials is the fact, as the National Post has learned, that so great was the trauma inflicted to those who died and those who were most gravely injured that they were effectively rendered unrecognizable.
It was hard to imagine how things could get worse for this poor team and town, but they have.