It’s been more than five years since two young boys were found murdered by their father in his Spruce Grove home, and now, their mother is sharing her tragic story.
When Tracy Stark remembers that day, the tears come quickly. She said things had been tense the night before between her and her ex-husband at one of their son’s hockey games.
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The next morning, she couldn’t get in touch with her boys and their school reported they were absent. That’s when she rushed over to their father’s house to check on them.
“Momma gut feeling. I just knew something was wrong,” Stark said.
When nobody answered the door, she through a window and saw her oldest boy on the floor.
“I could see his legs, they were covered in blood,” she said, crying.
She called 911 and waited for what she says felt like forever, but was really only minutes, for them to arrive.
“You don’t know what to do, you feel like you’re in a movie. It just didn’t feel real.”
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An investigator quickly confirmed her worst nightmare to be true. 13-year-old Ryder and 11-year-old Radek were dead, along with their dad — a double murder-suicide.
The communities of both Spruce Grove and Whitecourt were shaken.
Stark was broken. Healing is an ongoing process.
“It does get easier,” she said, more than five years later.
“There’s definitely some milestones that are really hard. My kids should be 19 and almost 17 right now. So I had to do a year with no graduation, no drivers license, no 18th birthday, no 16th birthday.”
A few years ago, her therapist recommended putting her emotions on paper.
“Writing, of course, in therapy can be very therapeutic. It gave us an opportunity to look at some of the things she was feeling,” explained trauma therapist Sandra Young Kolbuc.
Three years later, those words turned into a book. The pair decided to call it Gross Misconduct after the worst penalty in hockey, Ryder and Radek’s favourite sport.
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“(It’s) a raw story of every emotion I went through, from a messy divorce, messy custody battle, a controlling ex-husband and basically a justice system that doesn’t protect,” Stark explained.
She reached out to child protective services a few weeks before the deadly incident, and had emergency court orders against her ex- but said they were never enforced.
Despite her concerns, this wasn’t an outcome she expected.
“I never knew that their dad would ever be capable of doing something like that,” she said.
“They lost their lives, and to me that’s the ultimate sacrifice for a broken marriage. It breaks my heart actually.”
Stark hopes the book and her experience spur change, to save even just one child from going through what her boys did.
“I just want to make them proud every day, and I hope I do.”