Heavy drinking can be deadly, says family of teen
When Rean Heckroodt’s parents were cleaning out his apartment after his death, they found a bundle of love letters that his girlfriend had sent off with him to university.
Each one came with a direction on when he was to open it. One was “for when you are homesick,” for example. Another was “for when you need a reminder of why I love you.”
Only two of them — “for when you are stressed” and “for when you are sad” — had not yet been opened.
He didn’t need those ones, his parents thought — he was happy.
“He thoroughly enjoyed life,” his mom Marinda said Thursday, sitting in the family’s living room in Dundas. “Even at 18, I’d say he lived — and I know it’s kind of a cliché — more than some other people do in a lifetime.”
Rean (pronounced ‘Ray-an’) died on Oct. 9 after a night of partying with friends over the Thanksgiving weekend. His parents were told their son had passed out and asphyxiated after drinking close to a litre of rum in an hour. It wasn’t until the next morning that his friends called 911.
On Thursday, just over a week since his death, the family — who moved to Hamilton from South Africa 15 years ago — remembered Rean, the youngest of four, as a bright and ambitious teen who appreciated the little things in life.
“He was such an amazing kid. I think he would’ve been so good in life, because of his attitude,” Marinda says.
The Dundas Valley Secondary School graduate had started his first semester at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo this fall, studying business with dreams of moving to Australia.
“He had such a vision of where
he was going,” his dad Wian says.
He thrived in school, and always had lots of questions and opinions. He was not one to sit quietly in the back of the class.
Even as a young teen, they say, Rean would watch motivational speeches and pep talks on YouTube, hoping to better himself and broaden his horizons. That level of dedication was evident in everything he did. He was smart, but he didn’t coast — he worked hard because he loved to learn.
“Whatever he picked to do, he wanted to do it to the fullest,” his mom says.
When he took up the French horn in music class, for example, his dad says he spent close to 2,000 hours practising — and when he felt he’d mastered it, he moved on to the next thing.
Outside of school, he took extra online classes through the Khan Academy, for fun. And when he was picked to play goalie on his water polo team, he got a scuba weight belt to boost his training. At Laurier, where there was no water polo team, older brother Willem says Rean was working to create one. He’d also taken up bodybuilding and was looking to get his personal trainer certification to help others.
He was no wallflower. On occasion, the six-foot-three teen would wear eyeliner, even sometimes painting his eyes fully black.
“He wanted to get a rise out of people,” Willem says. “He liked to challenge societal norms.”
It was his dad who first learned the horrific news. The father and son had made plans for that Sunday, but Rean — who had gone to a party in the Kirkendall neighbourhood the night before — was not responding to his text messages. When Wian called his cellphone around 11:30 a.m., a police officer picked up.
Get to the hospital, the officer told him. By the time he arrived, Rean’s mom and older sister Wanda were already there. The two oldest siblings, Willem and Carmin, were out west and scrambled to book a flight home.
“Getting that call was brutal. I remember saying, ‘He’s so strong and so smart and so determined, he’ll be OK,’ ” Willem says.
When he learned a short time later that he had died, he says he was in a daze.
“It was snowing and I just remember sitting in the snow for hours waiting for our flight back. I didn’t even feel the cold … I still can’t believe it. I still look for him.”
Now, with the funeral behind them and a long grieving journey in front of them, the Heckroodt family is hoping that others — especially teenagers — will learn from their tragedy.
There is so much focus in high school on sex education, Marinda says, “but sex isn’t going to kill you.” She’d like to see kids learn first aid, and how to recognize when someone is in crisis.
The friends Rean was hanging out with when he died — old high school friends, from his year at Westdale (where, in Grade 11, he was in the International Baccalaureate program) — were “good nerdy kids,” she says.
And they’d had talks with him about drinking — but teens think they’re invincible.
“Look for the signs that someone is not OK,” Willem says. “We have to look after our friends and people in need.”
“Don’t just leave them,” his dad agrees. “Help them out.”
As a six-foot-three bodybuilder, Rean was mistaken his whole life as being older than he was. But he was still just a kid, his parents say — with his whole life ahead of him.
“He was our BFG (big friendly giant),” Wian remembers.
“He would hug everybody. He had a really soft heart.”