Humboldt Hockey Bus Crash Tragedy

Coroner's office misidentified victim in Humboldt hockey bus crash

The Saskatchewan Ministry of Justice announced Monday that the province's coroner's office misidentified one of the 15 people killed last week in the highway crash involving a junior hockey team bus.

The ministry announced that Parker Tobin, 18, has died and that Xavier Labelle, who previously had been identified as among the deceased, is alive.

The coroner's office apologized for "the misidentification and any confusion created by it." The ministry did not say how the error occurred.

"Our condolences go out to the family of Parker Tobin," the ministry's statement said. "Unfortunately, Parker is one of the 15 that have lost their lives in this terrible tragedy. Parker had been misidentified and was previously believed to have survived."

Both Tobin and Labelle were members of the Humboldt Broncos team. The deceased also include coach Darcy Haugan, bus driver Glen Doerksen and nine other players.

The Broncos were en route to a playoff game Friday when a truck carrying peat moss collided with their bus. The players were between the ages of 16 and 21. Fourteen people were injured in the crash.

The coroner's office also extended "its deepest sympathies to the families and friends of those who lost their lives as well as those who were involved in the collision."

Labelle's father, Paul Labelle, told the Saskatoon Star Phoenix on Saturday that he arrived at the scene of the crash along with his wife and daughter.

Paul Labelle, an emergency room physician, told the Star Phoenix that after initially trying to assist police at the scene, he and his family continued on their trip to Nipawin, where the Broncos were scheduled to play their playoff game later Friday night.

The Labelle family told the paper that they eventually were informed that Xavier, 18, had died in the crash. Paul said Saturday that the family was "numb right now," while his wife, Tanya, told the paper that they were "devastated."

Monday's news came one day after the Humboldt community mourned the deceased during a vigil at the Broncos' home arena. Team president Kevin Garinger choked back tears as he read out the names of the 15 dead. People embraced each other, crying. Tissue boxes were passed down rows. Flowers ringed the team logo at center ice. Pictures of the dead and injured were placed in front of the audience.

Team captain Logan Schatz, forwards Jaxon Joseph, Evan Thomas, Jacob Leicht, Logan Hunter and Conner Lukan, and defensemen Stephen Wack, Adam Herold and Logan Boulet were also among the dead, according to family members and others. Assistant coach Mark Cross, radio announcer Tyler Bieber and stats keeper Brody Hinz, who was 18, were also killed.

Nick Shumlanski, an injured player who was released from the hospital, attended the vigil wearing his white, green and yellow team jersey, with a bruise under his left eye.

Coroner misidentified victim

What we know about the misidentification of the hockey players

by Jason Markusoff, Macleans

Just two months separated the ages of Humboldt Broncos defenceman Xavier Labelle and goalie Parker Tobin. Both players had athletic builds, though one was two inches taller and five pounds heavier. And the two 18-year-olds had dyed yellow hair, as all teammates did for the Junior A league playoffs.

Friday’s team bus crash created one grim distinction: one Bronco teammate died, while the other is recovering from severe injuries in hospital. Yet, for nearly two days, medical authorities had wrongly told families tell which young men was which.

Saskatchewan’s medical examiner found out Sunday night, and announced publicly Monday morning, that Parker Tobin was dead and Xavier Labelle was injured. Authorities had initially concluded that the opposite was true. The Tobin and Labelle families were in Saskatoon this weekend at the hospital and makeshift morgue, respectively, apparently unable to realize immediately that they’d been standing over a boy that wasn’t theirs.

After the error had been realized, Labelle’s brother, Isaac Labelle, posted on Facebook: “All I can say is miracles do exist. My deepest condolences to the Tobin family.”

Government spokesman Drew Wilby apologized on behalf of the province and coroner’s office for the mixup. “I can’t even imagine putting myself in those families’ shoes, to first getting notice that your loved ones were in a collision of this nature, and then to find out who they thought was their loved one wasn’t potentially actually their loved one,” he told reporters Monday.

Wilby shed little light on how the rare mistake was made, as the coroner’s office was dealing with a tragedy of a scale unprecedented in recent Saskatchewan history, with 15 dead and 14 others injured. He noted that staff were challenged by the fact the young players had similar hair colour and builds. There wasn’t time to secure dental records—the usual gold standard for positive identification—and the families needed to know without having to wait days to scour dental offices across Western Canada for documents. So staff relied on information from various agencies and “community resources” to make their determination. We “believed that positive identification had been done appropriately,” said Wilby, who speaks for Saskatchewan’s justice ministry. All families that were told a member had died were in Saskatoon and helped with the identification process Saturday, he added.

On Sunday night, something raised questions for the professionals, and they were able to determine the hospitalized teen they thought was Tobin was actually Labelle, and they realized Tobin was, in fact, deceased.

Hockey broadcaster Ron MacLean, along with colleague Don Cherry, were in a Saskatoon hospital room on Sunday afternoon with Tobin’s parents and brother and the boy they believed was Parker. “I can remember the mom saying, ‘he’s beginning to look more like our boy.’ Can you imagine?” MacLean recalled Monday on a Rogers radio broadcast. “I even stood over the body and was sort of talking to the child, saying it’s Ron and Don, we want to do a coaches’ corner bedside for you tonight, everything’s going to be OK. And when I was saying that, the boy began to rise up a little bit and the nurse quickly put him back down, because this boy, we now know, was Xavier Labelle.”

In a joint statement, the Tobin and Labelle families said they are “grieving together,” and their focus will not be on “the confusion in an unimaginable tragedy.”

The news brings an intense blizzard of emotion for not only the biological parents, but also the billet parents who hosted Labelle from Saskatoon and the bespectacled Tobin from Stony Plain, a small city just west of Edmonton. Tobin’s hosts in Humboldt had two Broncos—the other, Tyler Smith, is recovering—while Rene and Devin Cannon had understood that all three of their billets had passed away: Labelle, Adam Herold and Logan Hunter.

While rare, there are other cases of coroners misidentifying the dead. In Southern Alberta in 2005, two young women were among six teens involved in a small car rollover. Judy Medicine Crane was told by Blood Tribe Police that her 17-year-old daughter Misty had died, while friend Chantal Many Greyhorses was in critical condition at a Calgary hospital—identification based in part on witness accounts, according to a Calgary Herald story.

Medicine Crane made funeral arrangements, and was warned her daughter’s disfigurement was so severe the mom shouldn’t view the body. She realized something was amiss when the jewellery bag the funeral director gave her contained a silver tongue ring, not Judy’s silver piercing. Then the funeral director checked for the tattoo the mother had described—it wasn’t there. Judy was actually the one in the Calgary hospital, severely brain damaged, and Medicine Crane had time to visit her loved one before hospital staff removed the tubes and machines.

Last year in California, Frank Kerrigan had buried the person he thought was his 57-year-old son Frankie, a homeless and mentally ill man. The Orange County coroner’s office maintained they had identified him using his fingerprints, and told the elder Kerrigan it wasn’t necessary to come down and identify the body. Eleven days after the family held the funeral, a long-time family friend put the grieving father on the phone with his still-alive son.

The Kerrigan family has sued the coroner’s office for negligence.

What we know about the misidentification of the hockey players