WARNING: This story contains details that may be disturbing to some readers.
To Brenda Powder, her late fiancé Laurent Isadore was a wonderful father with a big heart.
She said Isadore was showing that heart this past Saturday, as part of a charity motorcycle ride near High Prairie, Alta.
The Red Road to Healing bike run was raising awareness and money to help people experiencing homelessness on Treaty 8 territory. Isadore was one of the organizers.
“He was always going out of his way to help anybody who needed it,” Powder said.
She was following the convoy of bikes in a separate vehicle, when she said she saw tragedy unfold just before noon on Highway 2 near Range Road 143.
“Suddenly, I saw the vehicle in front of the bikes make a sharp turn right and I saw the semi come through all the bikers,” Powder said.
“He ran over the bikes and people.”
RCMP said a semi tractor-trailer crossed the centre line on Highway 2 near Sucker Creek First Nation and hit a group of motorcycle riders.
Mounties said a 38-year-old man from the Driftpile First Nation and a 33-year-old man from Edmonton were killed. They’ve been identified by the Redrum Motorcycle Club as Isadore and his friend Tyler Duboski.
Police originally said six other riders with various levels of injury were taken to hospital. On Tuesday afternoon, police issued a correction to say at least four other riders were taken to hospital.
Powder said the scene was chaos.
“I went onto the highway and I could see bike parts, body parts all over,” Powder said.
“There was a bike on fire, there was a person rolled up … he wasn’t moving.”
Powder saw Isadore lying in the ditch and rushed over to him.
“I recognized his body, although his clothes were off from the accident,” Powder said.
“He took one last breath and it sounded like a sigh of relief… then his whole body went limp.”
The two were set to exchange vows later this month in the same community the ride would have ended in.
“I started screaming. I said, ‘Come back because we’re going to get married.'”
As she continues to mourn her fiancée, Powder wants people to remember Isadore’s spirit.
“There’s a saying he said all the time. It was ‘lead with love.’ In everything that you do, lead with love,” Powder said.
Treaty 8 lands include 40 First Nations and is the largest treaty in Canada by area at 840,000 square kilometres — larger than France.
It spreads into British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories and has about 40,000 members in Alberta.
RCMP said while the investigation into the crash continues, alcohol impairment is not believed to be a factor.
— With files from Karen Bartko, Global News