The father of Jordan and Evan Caldwell told a crowd at a prayer breakfast Thursday morning about his final memories of his boys who lost their lives riding toboggans down the bobsled track at Canada Olympic Park after hours.
The 17-year-old twins and six other teenage boys used personal sleds to go down the track and hit a large gate used to separate the luge and bobsled tracks.
The other six boys were injured.
The incident happened early in the morning of Feb. 6, and Jason Caldwell recounted how his family shared a supper together before the incident, as they often did.
“I hugged each of them before they headed out the door to their church youth group event.”
He went on to explain how quickly things went wrong.
“Hours later as they sat around a restaurant table with several other teenagers, a dreadful idea took shape; a high-jinx toboggan ride down the Canada Olympic bobsled track,” he said, adding that the boys’ zest for adventure combined with their teenage brains had not been able to calculate the potential danger. He also said that none of the parents could have imagined what catastrophe awaited them.
Caldwell described getting a text message early the next morning asking if he knew where his boys were, and then standing in the waiting room at the Foothills hospital with the other parents.
“We soon came to realize that our boys weren’t there. I was taken out to a police cruiser and driven down the hill to the medical examiner’s office and I fell to my knees between the bodies of my sons.”
READ MORE: Friends and family remember twin brothers killed at Canada Olympic Park
Caldwell has used faith to help him get through the past few months. He described a moment days after the accident when he was standing at the top of the bobsled run trying to make sense of what happened and likening the track itself to a metaphor for life.
“A wide smooth and inviting straight stretch at the beginning; we don’t know what’s just around the corner. There is no advance warning saying, ‘head’s up. You are approaching the last turn of your life.’”
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Caldwell talked about how his family and many others whose kids were there that night have been judged harshly since the accident.
“My entire professional career has been focused on risk management.”
Caldwell’s work is centred around recovery after crashes and attacks in a virtual world. Caldwell spoke of feeling totally helpless as the reality of what had happened to his family hit him.
“On that moment as I kneeled on the concrete floor of the medical examiners’ office all I could say is, ‘thank God I don’t have to worry about where my sons are.’”
Some of the boys who were also on the track that night were at the prayer breakfast.
“The plan had been set. Evan was on the first sled and Jordan would be on the third. As Jordan gave sled two the push-off over the edge of the track everybody heard him bellowing out, ‘Our Father who art in heaven’…he was praying the Lord’s Prayer over sled two, and sled two never hit the barrier. My son’s last act in life was praying for his friends.”
With files from Jill Croteau and the Canadian Press
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