Break-in on top of her grieving

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This article was published 24/12/2014 (4261 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was bad enough Marlene Pelletier was killed, and her grandson, Ashton, 14, was seriously injured in a car crash last Wednesday.

But when Stephanie Bradley, Marlene’s daughter, returned home to Richer on Monday after spending the weekend at her son’s bedside at Children’s Hospital, the exhausted 37-year-old was beyond grief.

Heartless thieves had broken into her house and taken some of the rent money and Christmas gift cards intended to buy a bed for Ashton.

The break-in outraged the family’s close friends.

“My wife thought this story should be told,” said longtime friend Will Philippot, from Children’s Hospital, where he was sitting with Stephanie Bradley.

“I just find this wrong, that this has to happen,” Philippot said. “These are good people. They’ve been through enough.”

Bradley agreed to tell her story, as did her daughter, Josephine Bradley, 17.

Both were emotionally crushed and initially Stephanie Bradley declined to speak publicly. “This is not a good time,” she hesitated over the phone Wednesday.

It took her friends to convince her to tell the story. Maybe people will want to help, Bradley was told.

She broke down in tears at the thought.

“This has been the worst week of my life,” she said between sobs.

Outside Children’s Hospital later Wednesday evening, Bradley said her mother, her daughter Luna, 4, and Ashton were driving the 30 kilometres from Richer to Steinbach to buy her a birthday gift.

The kids were looking forward to the Christmas break with their grandmother and their mother’s birthday the next day.

Ashton Bradley is in Grade 9 at Ste. Anne. Collegiate. His sister, Josephine, is in Grade 12.

The RCMP released an official statement on what happened next.

“Shortly before 7 p.m., Steinbach RCMP responded to a two-vehicle collision on Highway 311, approximately one kilometre east of Highway 12. An eastbound pickup truck and a westbound car collided head-on. The 59-year-old female driver of the car was deceased at the scene.”

The cold, hard facts hide the heartbreak.

“My son barely escaped with his life,” Bradley said. “He sat with my mother for a period of time after she died.”

The boy knew his grandmother was gone. “He’d checked her for a pulse… He’s really had a rough go of it,” Bradley said.

Ashton broke major bones from his collarbone down to his ankle, including his pelvis.

His little sister, Luna, strapped into a car seat in the back, took the full force of an airbag to her face. She suffered a mild concussion and two black eyes.

RCMP said in its statement no charges had been laid; a forensic collision reconstruction analyst was still working on the investigation last week.

“The 34-year-old driver of the pickup, also from Ste. Anne, suffered minor injuries, as did a four-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy with her. All were treated and later released,” RCMP said.

Tuesday evening, Bradley returned home from the hospital to discover the break-in.

“We live in a small town, and everyone knows what’s happened,” she said, adding when the family left for the hospital earlier that day, they had left the back door unlocked by accident.

Her daughter, Josephine Bradley, picked up the story from there.

“They’d gone through my mother’s purse, my purse and my grandmother’s purse. There was stuff all over.”

Missing were gift cards worth about $300. And, curiously, only $100 from $1,000 in cash was missing from the rent envelope.

The family plans to spend Christmas with Ashton at Children’s Hospital.

This spring, on Mother’s Day, they will hold a private memorial service. The date would have been her parents’ 40th wedding anniversary.

Bradley said three weeks before the crash that killed her mother, she and her children had persuaded the older woman to move from Thunder Bay, where she’d been nursing her ailing mother, Bradley’s grandmother. Marlene had just been diagnosed with congestive heart failure.

“At least we had those three weeks with her,” Bradley said.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca