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  “Mom,” he said, “you have to come to the hospital. Something happened to Scott.”

  Louise and her husband, Walt, immediately headed for the hospital, where they took seats in the waiting room. Shortly after arriving, Louise found herself comforting Kari Kesslar, who was waiting for news on Trent Kresse, her fiancé.

  (Later it would be revealed that Brian Costello, the Swift Current Sun sports writer who had spoken with Kresse on the bus, had stumbled on a set of keys in the field near the wreckage. The key fob had the name Kari on it. Knowing that the keys belonged to Kresse, Costello didn’t have the heart to pass along something so trifling as car keys to Kari at that particular time. So he gave the keys to a member of the coaching staff, who later gave them to her.)

  A few minutes after the Krugers arrived at the hospital, assistant coach Lorne Frey, who was Louise’s brother, entered the waiting room and immediately told them that four players — including their son Scott — were dead.

  When Wilkie and Soberlak first arrived at the hospital, they knew only that Mantyka had been killed. They knew that only because they had watched helplessly as their teammate had died, the weight of the bus crushing the life out of him.

  “I’m not sure who eventually told me about the other three,” Wilkie says. “At the hospital, I continued to fade in and out of consciousness, and to this day I am unable to recall who told me.”

  Later that night, Wilkie was moved into a room with Kurt Lackten, a forward from Kamsack, Saskatchewan, who was the Broncos’ captain. According to Wilkie, they lay in their beds and talked … and talked … and talked.

  “We talked about what had happened — what we knew, who had survived, and who hadn’t,” Wilkie remembers. “It was all very, very sad, and the weight of it was oftentimes more than we could bear. There were tears and more tears.”

  Lackten had been one of the last players to leave the accident site for the hospital. He had spent a lot of time trying to help people in and around the crashed bus. He emerged from the accident with cuts and bruises, as did everyone else, and was later found to have some cracked ribs.

  “Kurt truly had shown a strong compassionate side to his personality by forgetting about himself and his injuries,” Wilkie says. “In my eyes, he had done what heroes do.”

  Lackten, now a Honolulu-based commercial pilot with Hawaiian Airlines, doesn’t see himself as a hero. He was the team captain — “I think it was a team vote,” he says. Asked if he was always seen as a leader, Lackten pauses before saying, “I guess everybody likes to think so.”

  For his part, he says he has no recollection of helping people get off the bus or providing aid to them once they were outside. Over the years, he has tried to remember, he says, but there just isn’t anything there.

  “I really can’t say,” he says, when asked about his role post-accident. “I really don’t remember helping people out.”

  He knows that, like everyone else, he exited the bus through what used to be the windshield. After that, well, “I don’t really remember a whole bunch.”

  Lackten assumes that he can’t remember because of shock, but admits that he has nothing other than personal experience on which to base that. However, he does remember his injuries, especially a four-inch gash on the back of his head. It was that gash, more than anything else, that led to his bloodied appearance.

  “I remember the doctor was an old-time doctor,” Lackten says with a chuckle. “I can’t remember his name. He was an old-timer. I remember it being really busy and crazy there.

  “I’d had tons of stitches before. Even after a game or during a game, they kind of take their time. This guy didn’t take his time. He just did it as quick as he could and he moved on. I remember that. I remember thinking, That was kind of weird.”

  It could be that Lackten remembers that episode because it left him with a souvenir of the accident.

  “I don’t have much hair any more and I cut it real close,” he explains. “You can see that scar — it’s a real butcher job. It’s like he folded it over. But that’s all right. It’s no big deal.”

  He knows that he also was left with a couple of cracked ribs, but has no recollection of being taken for X-rays. He knows that when he got to the hospital, “a couple of guys were helping me and right by the door I collapsed. I think that is when I started feeling things.”

  He can’t recall any conversations he may have had with Wilkie, but does remember Colleen and Karen MacBean visiting him in hospital. Colleen was a long-time volunteer and education consultant with the Broncos, and also billeted players in the home she shared with her husband Frank, who was on the team’s board of directors. Karen, their daughter, was dating Lackten at the time.

  “After that, I don’t know,” Lackten says. “I can’t remember too much.”

  When Lackten finally dozed off, Wilkie found that sleep wasn’t going to come easily. As he lay in bed, Wilkie found himself thinking over and over again: Why did I survive?

  When the bus had begun its journey, he had been less than four feet from four teammates who now were dead. And now the questions — almost all of them prefaced by the word why — came in a torrent. It was like he had turned on a faucet and now couldn’t turn it off.

  “Why was I still here?”

  “Why did God do this?”

  “Why them?”

  As Wilkie searched for sleep, he remembered his dead teammates:

  “Brent, who was so young and talented and seemed to have such a bright future. Chris, with his huge smile and heart to match, who was like our big brother, always there to protect and support us. Scotty and Trent. They really were this team’s leaders. They were always upbeat and extremely talented. The two of them had such a great rapport with each other that it was like a comedy act when they got going on each other. Scotty was a joker and was always stirring something up. Trent was a little quieter. But both were quick and their comebacks always made you smile.”

  Wilkie had hit it off with Kruger and Kresse, who were talented local boys. Kruger had played the previous season with the Prince Albert Raiders, putting up 106 points, including eighty assists, in seventy-two games. Kresse was also a point machine; he had won the Saskatchewan junior league’s 1984–85 scoring championship, putting up 148 points, including 111 assists, in sixty-four games with the Swift Current franchise.

  Wilkie remembers returning to the Broncos after Christmas just days before the accident and sitting down with Kresse and Kruger.

  “The three of us had conversations in which we swore that we would drive each other toward our goals of being selected in the 1987 NHL draft,” Wilkie says. “It was a promise we would never get to keep.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Leesa’s Ride

  While the Swift Current Broncos played out the first half of their 1986–87 WHL season, Leesa Kraft was attending school in Moose Jaw. Originally from Penticton, British Columbia, she was a student at Aldersgate Bible College, a private school. She didn’t attend Warriors games; she didn’t know anything about the Broncos. In fact, she wasn’t even close to being a hockey fan.

  Near the end of December 1986, as most of the Broncos players headed home for Christmas, the twenty-one-year-old Kraft was on a Greyhound bus, en route to Penticton and Christmas with her family.

  Prior to the 1800s, Penticton, located in British Columbia’s south Okanagan, primarily was inhabited by the Salish, and the name Penticton means “a place to stay forever.”

  “It sure was a great place to grow up,” Leesa Kraft — now Leesa Culp — says, adding that every time she returns for a vacation she wonders why she left. The eldest of three children, she grew up in a bungalow-style house on Toronto Avenue, alongside her mother, Sharon, and father, Len, and with sister Shawna and brother Trevor.

  Len was a mechanic, and worked in the motorcycle shop — Kraft Cycle — operated by his father. So, as Leesa says, she grew up “knowing more about motorcycles, snowmobiles, hot rods, and race cars than I did about hockey
.”

  One of her few experiences with hockey came in the early 1980s when she accompanied Shelley Webber, a high school friend, to a few British Columbia Hockey League games at Memorial Arena. Webber was dating Penticton Knights goaltender Norm Foster, who would go on to a fourteen-year professional career that included thirteen NHL games. (During his career, he would be teammates at one time or another with five of the 1986–87 Broncos: Tracy Egeland, Ian Herbers, Clarke Polglase, Peter Soberlak, and Bob Wilkie.)

  During the eighteen-hour bus ride home for Christmas in 1986, Leesa had a lot of time to think about changes she was about to make in her life. She had met Bill Culp, a musician, and was planning a move to the Toronto area in order to be with him. As the bus sped west, she was trying to figure out just how she was going to break this news to her folks.

  “I dreaded telling my family of my plans to move even farther away from home,” she remembers. “My family was quite happy knowing I was living in a fairly sheltered environment surrounded by solid Christian influences on the Aldersgate campus. I wasn’t sure how my parents would react to this move.”

  As she rationalized it at the time, “The idea of living in a big city excited me. It was a thrill to think I would be making a move to a part of the country about which I knew very little. I had gone from a sheltered home environment to a sheltered college environment, and I knew this move to Ontario would allow me to experience a lifestyle very unlike the one I’d had.” But she knew there would be parental resistance.

  “For this very reason, and the fact they had never met Bill, I knew my parents would be extremely reluctant to support this move,” she says. “Knowing Bill was in a band put visions of a long-haired, tattooed, drug-smoking musician in my parents’ heads. No amount of convincing otherwise was going to change their minds.”

  (In truth, Bill Culp had short hair, didn’t have any tattoos, and didn’t do drugs. From Dunnville, Ontario, he is the youngest of four children. His father, Herb, was the vice-president of the Dunnville Minor Sports Association and even coached minor hockey for a number of years. Bill’s older brother Jamie played for Mount Royal College in Calgary and for the Dunnville Terriers, a junior C hockey team. In recent years, you may have seen Bill Culp on tour in “The Sun Records Show,” a tribute that includes the music of Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis.)

  Shawna, Leesa’s sister, had recently moved to Barrie, Ontario, in order to be closer to her future in-laws. So Leesa sold her parents on the move by telling them she would be closer to Shawna.

  “I was sure my parents would find comfort in knowing I wouldn’t be too many miles away from her if things didn’t work out,” Leesa says.

  After Christmas, the plan was for Leesa to ride a bus back to Moose Jaw, where she would begin preparations for a January 20 flight from Regina to Toronto. However, in an effort to save some money, Leesa’s parents suggested that she cash in her bus ticket and catch a ride with Mel Shepherd, a neighbour who drove a big rig back and forth between Penticton and Calgary. He would drop her off at the Calgary bus terminal and she would then take a Greyhound to Moose Jaw.

  Never having been in a big rig, Leesa remembers it as “the biggest truck I had ever been in.” She also remembers chatting with Mel and listening to 1980s pop songs like Glass Tiger’s “Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone” as the trip began.

  “Other than having to stop once to chain up before heading up a steep hill,” she says, “it was a pretty uneventful drive.”

  That began to change as they approached Calgary. With the weather about to change for the worse, Mel told Leesa that he really wanted to unload his trailer, reload immediately, and head right back to Penticton. This meant he wouldn’t be able to get her to the downtown bus terminal. Instead, he said, he knew a guy who was driving all the way to Montreal, and suggested they could hook up with him at the next truck stop. Essentially, Leesa would hitch a ride to Moose Jaw with another trucker, one she had never met.

  She was apprehensive but, she says, “I figured Mel must think I’d be safe or he wouldn’t suggest such an option.”

  Leesa and Mel grabbed a bite to eat at the truck stop, then got her luggage and headed for the other trucker’s rig. That’s when she saw the mural painted on the cab and immediately wondered if this was such a good idea.

  Both sides of the glossy red cab of the truck were painted with an image of a scantily clad woman. Everything inside Leesa was screaming Danger! but her options were rather limited, so she clambered into the truck’s cab.

  They hit the road, and it wasn’t long before the truck driver, a total stranger, started talking about the problems he was having with his wife. Which made Leesa think, “What trouble have I gotten myself into this time?”

  Leesa knew exactly what was happening. A married, overweight veteran trucker was hitting on a naive college student. Attempting to let this guy know she wasn’t available, Leesa mentioned “my boyfriend Bill” as often as possible.

  And then, a few hours into what normally was an eight-hour run to Moose Jaw, the trucker chose to pull over, saying that he was going to get some sleep. It was in the middle of nowhere and traffic was minimal, but Leesa was thankful that it still was daylight.

  As the trucker made his way to the back of the cab, where his bed was located, he told Leesa, “You should come back in the cab and get some sleep, too.” Terrified, she clung to the door handle and wondered, If I had to escape, what would I do? He would have all of my luggage and I’d be somewhere in Saskatchewan with nary a town in sight.

  About fifteen minutes later, the trucker climbed back into his seat. “I can’t sleep if I know you’re just sitting out here awake!” he said disgustedly. And just like that, they were back on the road to Moose Jaw.

  By then, the snow and wind were increasing, and it wasn’t long before the truck was caught in blizzard-like conditions. It may have been mid-afternoon, but it looked and felt more like early evening. It was in these conditions that they drove through Swift Current. As they reached the city’s eastern edge, the trucker eased off the gas to allow a bus to merge in front of his rig. About five minutes later, the Trans-Canada Highway veered to the right a bit. The bus appeared to lose its grip and started to slide sideways.

  With the bus slowing, the trucker geared down. Leesa and the trucker could only watch in disbelief as the rear end of the bus continued to slide down the steep roadside and into the ditch. Eventually, the bus fell over onto its right side. Then, after only a split second, it bounced right back up and continued to fly forward, still on the same steep angle.

  Leesa remembers seeing things ejected out the windows, onto the road and into the ditch. At the time, she wondered, Are those clothes flying out the windows? Once they got closer to the bus, they realized it wasn’t just clothes being tossed around like toothpicks in a storm — it was also people.

  After several seconds of bone-jarring turbulence, the bus came to a crashing halt in the snowy ditch, again on its right side.

  As the trucker pulled up beside the bus, he grabbed the handset for his CB and radioed for emergency assistance. Without further thought, he jumped out of the truck, yelling at Leesa, “Stay in the truck! Stay in the truck!”

  There was no way she was going to stay in the truck. She climbed out and walked briskly around to the back of the bus.

  “Suddenly,” she recalls, “I noticed two boys.…”

  In her words: “Lying all alone, one boy — years later I would learn that it was Scott Kruger — was face down in the snowy grass, and the other was on his back. I didn’t know much about emergency situations, but I knew you shouldn’t move someone in case of neck or back injuries, so I chose to rush over to the boy who was on his back, and I knelt down. I was wearing a full-length, wool-tweed winter jacket, and was tempted to sit him up and wrap my coat around him.

  “At the time, I felt a tremendous fear. Coming from a Free Methodist background, movies had been prohibited. I was twenty-one years of age a
nd had seen only one scary movie in my life — A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Although Bill found the movie disappointing, it had scared me silly. And now I think I was afraid that if I touched Trent [Kresse] he might make a sudden move and it would freak me out. I didn’t reach down quickly and take his hand. I was hesitant, and I was trembling as I reached for his left hand. It was so much bigger than my own.

  “His eyes were open, but sadly it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything to help him. As I held his hand, I watched in horror as the colour of his face transformed from a pasty white to a stony shade of blue. I had never felt so helpless. I kept thinking that maybe if I knew how to perform CPR — something, anything — I would be able to help. But it was too late. As I stood up and stepped back, a man approached and started to perform CPR on the boy whom I had been kneeling beside.”

  Leesa then took a moment to glance around. “It was then when I noticed the unimaginable — there were two more bodies trapped under the bus,” she says.

  With the bus on its side and the front door inaccessible, the trucker helped the remaining players and passengers out through the shattered windshield. The survivors began collecting themselves. They were looking around to see if everyone was okay. All around her, Leesa could hear moaning and crying, and people calling out for each other. She just stood there in disbelief.

  It wasn’t until almost twenty-one years later that Leesa learned that it was the Swift Current Broncos whose bus she had watched crash. In 1986, she didn’t follow hockey, nor did she hang out with anyone who did.

  One morning in January 2007, a headline on Yahoo! — “Fifth Teen Dies from Injuries in Meaford Crash” — practically leapt off her computer screen and caused flashbacks. The story chronicled an accident that had occurred on a wet, slushy highway and claimed the lives of five teenage hockey players. That was enough to awaken memories that had been mostly dormant for more than twenty years.