School holds service for teen girls struck and killed by train
Relatives, classmates, teachers, Mounties, air cadets and rugby players filled every seat of the Hants East Rural High auditorium Saturday afternoon to celebrate the lives of two teenage girls who were struck and killed by a freight train last week.
Members of the rural Nova Scotia community gathered at the Lantz high school where 17-year-old Cienna MacPherson was supposed to graduate this month, with a live feed being streamed for the friends and family of 18-yearold former international student Joana Hofer, who was visiting from Germany at the time of the accident.
Rev. Canon David Fletcher, who officiated the service, said the rumbling tracks, clanging of gates and whistle of the train that is a part of daily life along the Trunk 2 highway corridor had taken on new sombre meaning.
“We live with trains,” he told the crowd.
“We also now share a tragedy ... Over the next many days, months and indeed years, whenever we hear the trains we will think of Cienna and Jo.”
Fletcher encouraged locals still reeling from the loss of the two young women to draw on one another for strength, but cautioned that concrete answers surrounding the circumstances of the teenagers’ deaths may remain elusive.
“Some of us will come looking for facts. How did this happen? What was going on?” he said. “The answers to questions such as those do not serve the heart that well.”
According to RCMP investigators, the teens were not at a crossing when they were hit by the Halifax-bound CN train on June 10. A spokesperson for CN Rail said the crew followed all the proper procedures, but that it was physically impossible to stop the train in time.
Const. Tammy Lobb said the investigation is ongoing, but we may never know exactly what happened that night, and the only people who do are unfortunately no longer with us.
Many members of the audience had known MacPherson since she was a child. Some had seen her loping across the rugby field or marvelled at her sense of artistry from her portraits of her sister, Jessica, right down to the designs on her hand-painted canvas sneakers. A select few had shared the skies with her after she earned her single engine pilot’s licence with the Air Cadets in 2015.
In their tributes, instructors joked about being on the receiving end of her “sarcastic” sense of humour.
“She was a little bit of a wild child,” said rugby coach Craig Sherry, standing on stage by a display of championship plaques and MacPherson’s number 13 jersey. “She was living on the edge. Loved to meet people. Loved to do things. And I think that wild child came out hard.”