Fatal B.C. bus crash investigation slowly progressing

Another victim of the fatal Christmas Eve bus crash has been identified: an 18-year-old girl from the Lower Mainland who was headed home to see her family the night of the crash.

Kathy Kim Le was taking the bus home from Kelowna, B.C. for Christmas, headed to see her family in Langley.

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Her father shared a picture on social media showing the last conversation he had with his daughter, when she said would be back late.

The girl never made it home, and her family has been sharing pictures of her online, devastated by the loss of their daughter.

The incident happened nearly two weeks ago and police say the investigation is slowly progressing.

“There’s a lot of data aspects we have to incorporate and analyze. We’re still waiting on a few of those and once we have everything we’ll have a total picture of what has transpired,” said Const. James Ward of the BC Highway Patrol.

“Sometimes it makes it harder having to tow the bus back to Kelowna to have it stored, that adds some time to it.”

2:20 RCMP investigating cause of fatal Christmas Eve bus crash

In total, four people were killed in the crash, and another 41 were injured. Police say an added level of intricacy, in this case, is that all of those survivors need to be spoken to for the investigation to move forward.

“Some of them are local, some are not local, some are international so it adds different layers of complexity. Sometimes you have to involve embassies and other police agencies,” said Ward.

“The threshold is a lot greater because of the amount of victims involved.”

As the incident was a major vehicle accident, the collision analysis and reconstruction service were also on scene and they’re now investigating the factors which caused the collision.

“I responded on Christmas Eve to that bus crash and collected all the physical evidence that we could on the side of the road. Waiting for a few more different parts, from different agencies either mechanical inspection and other electronic data that’s available,” said Collision Analysis and Reconstruction Service officer Cpl. Louis Allain.

Since the vehicle involved was a bus, 53 seatbelts needed to be examined and tires needed to be inspected with the weather conditions on scene.

“We’ll do some drag factor testing so how much force is required to move an object on that surface so I did that testing on the scene there, Christmas Eve. That will help us determine if there’s some coefficient of friction or if it was a factor in the collision,” said Allain.

Police say for collisions involving fatalities it may take up to 12 months before a decision is made to present charges.