Residents gather to support Humboldt
Regina, Saskatoon honour victims
Eli Lieffers knows as well as anyone what it means to spend time on a hockey team bus, watching the prairie landscape drift across the window and waiting for the puck to drop in some faraway arena.
That’s why the 18-year-old hockey player decided to attend a candlelight vigil outside Saskatoon’s city hall on Sunday, two days after 15 people aboard the Humboldt Broncos’ bus were killed in a horrific highway crash.
“Hockey is kind of a fraternity,” said Lieffers, who just finished a season with the Saskatoon Contacts in the Saskatchewan Midget AAA Hockey League, and expects to play next season with the Western Hockey League’s Kootenay Ice.
“You may be going against a guy all year, against a different team,
It’s not just a couple guys getting together to play hockey at night. It’s a band of brothers.
but when something like this happens you all come together and you’re all one family … It’s not just a couple guys getting together to play hockey at night. It’s a band of brothers.”
Lieffers was among the several hundred people who braved unseasonably cold weather to attend the vigil, which unfolded against a backdrop of Saskatoon fire trucks. A Broncos jersey hung from one of them, shifting slightly in the gentle breeze.
Ten players, two coaches, a volunteer statistician, a radio broadcaster and the bus driver died when the Junior A team’s bus and a semi collided north of Tisdale around 5 p.m. Friday. The other 14 people on the bus were injured.
“It’s OK to just grieve together and be together,” said Elise Ruiters, who used to serve the Nipawin area when she worked as a paramedic and said she decided to organize the vigil after learning no one else had stepped forward.
Hundreds more attended a similar vigil in Regina on Sunday night. Some placed candles on the ground next to bags emblazoned with the faces of Broncos players who were lost in the crash; others held each other silently as music played. A few chanted, “Let’s go Broncos.”
“I think it’s important in a gathering such as this, when we are grieving as a city, as a province and as a country that we come together and support each other,” Regina Mayor Michael Fougere said. “And a vigil such as this is a place to express all (our) heartbroken feelings.”
Mitchell Ervin was among the many young Regina hockey players who came dressed in their team jerseys. The 13-year-old Peewee A Bisons player said he can’t imagine the shock of those who survived the collision.
“It’s all one hockey family. Any one of us could have been on that bus.”