Teenage Tragedy

"What can you say when you lose three young gentlemen in the prime of youth?"
"Losing three young, energetic gentlemen, we just can't seem to grasp that right now."
Carrot Lake Mayor Robert Gagne

"The community is always in a state of shock when you have children involved in a tragedy."
North East School Division superintendent Rob McKay

The scene of a four-vehicle collision near Spalding, Sask., where three teens died Sunday. A highway worker was also critically injured in the collision and is in hospital in Saskatoon.  Photograph by: Liam Richards, The StarPhoenix

There are always no end of sad news items about young teens, usually boys, hurt or killed in vehicle accidents. Young men in company with one another tend to be impulsive, sometimes reckless, since the young always tend to feel invulnerable, that the world is theirs to experiment with and to discover, and nothing could ever occur that would blemish in any measure their expectations of their future.

Matters, however, are not always what they seem. And in small-town Saskatchewan in a town of a thousand people roughly 300 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon, there is grief and mourning at the death of three young boys, in a town where everyone knows the families and their dreadful loss impacts the entire community.

The teens were aged 17, 15 and 14, and they were pronounced dead on Sunday afternoon on Highway 6 close to Melfort, Saskatchewan. "It's shock here, absolute shock. It's sombre here today on Main Street", stated town administrator Kevin Trew, uttering the general dismay that has assailed the entire population.

So were these reckless kids, driving erratically, too fast and careless, causing an accident that proved fatal to them? They were driving in a Chevrolet Cavalier when their vehicle approached a construction site. The 17-year-old driver stopped behind a stationary Dodge pickup truck in the northbound lane, driven by a 48-year-old man.

Along came a semi-tractor-trailer driven by a 38-year-old man from Manitoba, which crashed into the Cavalier, shoving it violently into the back of the pickup. The struck vehicle hit a 21-year-old British Columbia man at work on the highway as a flagman, and continued its passage across the highway to collide with a construction pilot vehicle.

The flagman, rushed to a hospital in Saskatoon was in critical condition while the drivers of the Dodge truck, the construction pilot vehicle and the semi-tractor trailer escaped with minor injuries, taken by ambulance, and treated at a hospital in Melfort, then released. RCMP traffic reconstructionists based in Saskatoon arrived on scene to investigate.

Alcohol was ruled out as a possible cause, and no charges were laid as yet.