Victim misidentified with bus-truck crash survivor
Word of mix-up rocks already shaken families
The error is unimaginable: One boy, thought dead, is alive. Another believed alive, is dead.
In a devastating mix-up, a victim and survivor in the Humboldt Broncos bus crash were misidentified as the other, a mistake described as unprecedented in Saskatchewan’s history.
It may also speak to just how horribly wounded even the survivors were that parents could not recognize their own boys.
Broncos defenceman Xavier Labelle, an 18-year-old from Saskatoon who was initially identified as one of those killed in Friday’s crash that obliterated the front of the hockey squad’s bus, survived. He was in hospital Monday.
Parker Tobin, an 18-yearold from Stony Plain, Alta., whose mother tweeted on the weekend that her son was alive and being airlifted to hospital, in fact died in the crash.
“All I can say is miracles do exist. My deepest condolences to the Tobin family,” Isaac Labelle, Xavier’s brother, wrote Monday on Facebook.
It was not clear Monday exactly how the error occurred. Both families have asked for privacy. However, Saskatchewan’s Office of the Chief Coroner, which publicly apologized to the families on Monday, has been the subject of two official reviews in recent years.
In the Humboldt mixup that brought joy to one family, and numbing heartache to another, officials said they believed proper identification procedures had been followed and that families of the players had been involved in identifying victims at a makeshift morgue.
“It is a process — it’s not one individual that makes the identification decision,” Drew Wilby, of Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Justice, told reporters Monday.
“There is a lot of work that goes into that, through identifying the survivors of an incident like this, looking at the level of trauma that was involved and trying to determine who is who.”
With their bleached blond hair and solid builds, many of the boys looked alike, Wilby added. “They had the blond hair that was supportive of their team for their playoff run. They’re very similar builds. They’re all very similar ages and they’re very athletic of course as they are junior A hockey players.”
While dental records can confirm a person’s identity “100 per cent,” records take time to gather, Wilby said. “These boys are from all over the prairies …. We went on the process we established and believed that positive identification had been done appropriately.”
He said the mistake was only realized after “new information” emerged, but wouldn’t elaborate, citing privacy legislation. He said he didn’t feel the identification process had been rushed. “The families needed information, they needed information about who their loved ones were and what state they were in.”
Both families have asked for privacy, and said in a joint statement that they “hope the focus will remain on those grieving and those recovering, not the confusion in an unimaginable tragedy.”
In a talk radio interview Monday, broadcaster Ron MacLean described how he and Don Cherry stood in the intensive care unit with Parker Tobin’s family, as they looked at who they thought was their son, but in fact was Xavier Labelle.
“But as we looked at who we thought was Parker Tobin, the mom — so imagine, the mom and dad and the brother, they don’t know that they’re not looking at their own boy, that he’s so severely cut and hurt that they actually think it’s possibly their boy,” MacLean said in the interview on Rogers stations.
“And I can remember her, this is Parker, the mom, saying, “He’s beginning to look more like our boy.’
“Can you imagine? And it wasn’t, of course, their boy.
“And the dad saying, ‘When Parker was a child he had chicken pox, and there was this one scar on his forehead, and thankfully this seven inch gash will make that immaterial.”
MacLean said Labelle, “in addition to these horrific cuts, he had a vertebrate broken, he had a rib broken, he had a hip broken, he had a lacerated liver. All of the children were mangled beyond a miracle, really.”
Wilby acknowledged the difficulties faced by all of those with connections to the crash — and now, in the latest cruel twist, the families of Labelle and Tobin.
“To not be at their son’s side right from the start would be incredibly traumatic,” he said of Labelle’s family.
For Tobin’s family, Wilby said, “this is not easy news for them to digest.”
When asked what on earth could he have said to the families affected, “I don’t think anything you could ever say would be enough … I don’t think enough could ever be said.”
Bonnie Schatz, whose son, Logan, was killed in the crash, expressed sorrow about the ordeal suffered by two of his teammates’ families.
“We’re feeling so bad for those families that have gone through so much already … We feel very sorry for them. I can’t imagine finding that out, for either family,” said Schatz, whose 21-year-old son played just over four seasons with the Junior A hockey team and was serving as team captain.
While everybody responding to the unprecedented highway disaster is “trying to do their best,” it’s clear that the Labelle and Tobin families’ will have a “journey (that) is going to go on longer,” Schatz said Monday from her home in Allan.
The mix-up follows other controversies at the Saskatchewan coroner’s office, one involving the death of a 29-year-old Regina mother who fell down a laundry chute at a city hotel in January 2015. The coroner’s office provided Nadine Machiskinic’s family with two different autopsy reports, one which said she could have got into the laundry chute on her own, another that said such a feat was “unlikely.” Machiskinic’s family had questioned whether foul play might have been involved in her death.
Then, in November 2016, the province was forced into an embarrassing climb down after a bill that would have done away with automatic public inquests for in-custody deaths had to be scrapped, following public anger.
A LOT OF THESE BOYS LOOKED ALIKE. THEY HAD THE BLOND HAIR THAT WAS SUPPORTIVE OF THEIR TEAM FOR THEIR PLAYOFF RUN. THEY’RE VERY SIMILAR BUILDS. THEY’RE ALL VERY SIMILAR AGES AND THEY’RE VERY ATHLETIC OF COURSE. — DREW WILBY
TO NOT BEAT THEIR SON’S SIDE RIGHT FROM THE START WOULD BE INCREDIBLY TRAUMATIC.