It’s been one year since a boat crash on Osoyoos Lake in B.C.’s Okanagan claimed the lives of two longtime friends.
Nicholas Trask, 36, and Ryan Ellison, 35, died instantly when the speedboat they were in collided with another boat on June 8, 2019.
Trask’s mother, Jill Maddigan, told Global News Monday that she still doesn’t know what caused the crash.
The Fraser Valley woman travelled to the Okanagan for the grim anniversary.
RCMP will take her out on the lake to the exact spot where her son died at 7:14 p.m., the exact time Trask lost his life.
“It feels important to me to be where he took his last breath because we were together when he took his first one,” said an emotional Maddigan. “This is just hopefully a connection point for us, that’s all. It’s just something we wanted to do for my son.”
Trask, his wife Melissa and their two sons, Vincent, 9, and Evan, 7, had come up to the Okanagan from Maple Ridge to go camping.
They brought along Trask’s good friend, Ryan Ellison, who’d been living in Kamloops.
The duo were out on the lake doing a little pre-dinner fishing when their boat collided with an aluminium fish boat carrying three people.
Witnesses at the time told Global News that the two boats just “plowed” into one another.
Both boats sank.
The three people in the other vessel were rescued and transported to hospital with minor injuries.
The bodies of Trask and Ellison were recovered a day later by the RCMP underwater recovery team.
The BC Coroners Service said Monday that the investigations into the two deaths remain open.
-With files from Shelby Thom
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