BF2S Forums Icy crash kills seven members of basketball team and one adult in N.B.

A van carrying a high school boys' basketball team home from a game was only five minutes from waiting parents when it fish-tailed on a slippery highway and slammed into a tractor-trailer, killing seven players and one adult.

Emily Cleland, sister of victim Nathan Cleland, said some parents had gathered at a fast-food restaurant to pick up their children who were expected at about 11:30 p.m. in this small northern New Brunswick city.

But by midnight, when there was no sign of their white school van, families began to worry that something had gone wrong on the icy two-lane highway leading into Bathurst.

Their fears were confirmed moments later when they got a call telling them to go to a hospital because there had been an accident.

When they arrived, parents saw police and ambulances bringing in the four survivors.

"My parents had seen the first two boys come in - one with a broken arm and the other with broken ribs - so they figured they had brought in the worst-case scenarios first and they weren't really worried," Cleland, 18, said from the family home.

"And that's when they realized that the ambulances had stopped coming because the other ones had died on impact."

The Bathurst High Phantoms were returning from a game in Moncton, N.B., about 220 kilometres away, when the accident occurred on Highway 8 outside Bathurst shortly after midnight.

The force of the collision tore off the rear and a large piece of the passenger side of the large 15-seat van, and ejected benches and people everywhere. Hours later, the snow was still smeared with blood and littered with bits of plastic, lunch bags, debris and surgical gloves.

"When members arrived at the scene, all eight were dead - there was nothing we could do," RCMP Sgt. Derek Strong said during a news conference later.

"This was a very, very major impact."

Strong said the road was icy at the time and the van's driver - a teacher at the school and also the team's coach - lost control. He survived but his wife, a teacher at another school who was supervising the team, was killed.

Strong said officers who went to the accident scene were shaken by what they saw.

"Police officers go to a lot of accident scenes but this one was above and beyond anything any of us are used to," he said.

Condolences were being posted on the school's website from people across the country, while a Facebook site set up to remember those killed had hundreds of members and photos of the teens by day's end.