Driver in crash that devastated hockey team sentenced to 8 years
OTTAWA, ONTARIO — A truck driver whose inattention led to the deaths of 16 people aboard a youth hockey team bus in Saskatchewan last year, a collision that shook Canada, was sentenced to eight years in prison Friday.
The defendant, Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, had driven a tractor-trailer laden with peat moss at about 60 mph past five signs warning him to stop before the truck collided with a bus carrying the team, the Humboldt Broncos. Thirteen other people were injured last April in the crash, which occurred with such force that the bus flipped on its side and the two vehicles slid well off the highway before coming to a stop in a pile of rubble.
Many of the victims were young players who had come from across Western Canada to live with families in Humboldt, a farm town of about 6,000. They had joined the Broncos with hopes of either advancing to a professional careers or getting college scholarships.
Canadians mourned the loss of so many young lives, which prompted an outpouring of donations from across the country for the survivors and families of the dead. Informal memorials, like symbolic hockey sticks left in front of homes, quickly appeared.
Sidhu had earlier pleaded guilty to 29 counts of dangerous driving.
“Families have been torn apart because of the loss,” Judge Inez Cardinal said at the hearing in Melfort, Saskatchewan, after reviewing more than 100 statements from victims. “Somehow we must stop this carnage on our highways.”
Sidhu, who worked for a tiny trucking company in Alberta, was on his first solo trip about two weeks after qualifying as a truck driver.
There was no sign he was impaired by drugs or alcohol on the night of crash, nor was he using his phone as he sped past the corner’s oversize stop sign and its flashing warning light. Nothing on the corner obstructed his view of the approaching bus, nor did he notice that an oncoming car had stopped for it.
The judge said Sidhu appeared to have been distracted by a flapping tarp on one of the trailers.
“This was not a momentary loss of attention,” Cardinal said. “He had ample time to stop his unit.”
She added: “Seconds matter; attention to the road matters.”
At an earlier hearing, prosecutors said investigators had concluded that it was impossible for the driver of the team bus, who was among the victims, to have avoided slamming into Sidhu’s truck.
The sentence was less than the 10 years that prosecutors had sought, but it is longer than most dangerous-driving sentences in Canada. Sidhu, who is 30 and lives in Calgary, Alberta, will probably be deported to India after his release from prison.