Driven: How the Bathurst Tragedy Ignited a Crusade for Change by Richard Foot

Author:Richard Foot [Foot, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780864927859
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2013-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

Six

TESTIMONY

WHILE ANA AND Isabelle wouldn’t have legal standing or representation at the upcoming coroner’s inquest, they were invited to help shape its tone and direction. Greg Forestell, the province’s acting chief coroner who would preside over the inquest, and George Chiasson, the Bathurst lawyer appointed by Forestell to ask questions on behalf of the Crown, each consulted with the moms in advance, both in person and by email, asking them to submit the names of potential witnesses and suggest areas that the inquiry should explore.

Ana was busy attending her college classes in Moncton, but Isabelle took up the coroner’s challenge with gusto. For six weeks she toiled in her basement office, pouring over the RCMP and Transport Canada accident reports, studying the motor vehicle laws, the Education Act, the van maintenance records, and even the weather reports from January 12, 2008. Almost every night, she and Melynda would talk for hours via Skype, Isabelle explaining what she’d learned through her research that day, and Melynda turning Isabelle’s new knowledge and her queries into formal, coherent questions for Chiasson to ask at the inquest. For Isabelle the task became on obsession.

“Some days I was up at six or seven in the morning, working in my downstairs computer room,” she says, “and I often didn’t leave that room until two or three the next morning. I just slept down there. I’d work all day and late into the night, then crawl into Daniel’s bed in the room next door, and go back into the computer room the next day. My sister Linda would come down and feed me.

“I just wanted the best for the boys. I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned.”

In the end Isabelle submitted a list of more than a dozen people she wanted called to the witness stand, along with as many as two thousand detailed questions for Chiasson to ask. Not twenty questions, or even two hundred, but two thousand, a sign of Isabelle’s relentless, single-minded, uncompromising handling of all matters relating to Daniel’s death. Some of the witnesses she requested were never called to testify, but many were, and many of the questions so doggedly researched and crafted by Isabelle and Melynda would end up shaping the very heart of the various lines of inquiry pursued by Chiasson at the hearings.

During Isabelle’s research she stumbled across an extraordinary, long-forgotten document on the New Brunswick government Web site—a 2001 safety review of the school transportation system by the provincial auditor general. The audit was mainly focused on the use of yellow school buses to transport eighty-nine thousand New Brunswick students each day between home and school. But the audit also included a review of extracurricular travel—the safety of the “vans or cars that student councils own and operate for the purpose of transporting students to and from various school related activities”—precisely the system that was in place at Bathurst High School at the time of the crash.

The audit was highly critical of the Department of Education’s safety measures for school transportation in general.

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