Fatal fire that killed four boys emotional for many

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This article was published 28/12/2015 (3803 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ON a frigid day in February, as the sun burns low in the sky, Free Press photographer Ruth Bonneville and I are sitting on a side road in the tiny community of Kane, Man., next to a black pit where a farmhouse used to be. The place where four brothers — Bobby, Timmy, Danny and Henry Froese — lost their young lives in a horrific overnight fire.

I am attempting to wring the right words from numb fingers in Ruth’s passenger seat, on deadline.

It’s a tragic story and a tough assignment, one that requires you to knock on the doors of stricken neighbours, trying to piece together who these boys were in order to add some humanity to a shocking headline. It requires you to interrupt ritual afternoon coffee meetings among men in baseball caps, silent in their grief. “I’m sorry to bother you, but… “

“One wonders how many tears were blinked back by stoic Prairie men that afternoon,” I wrote. Indeed, they were stoic. They were also incredibly generous. We met incredible people that day, people who were willing to open up to a columnist and a photographer from the city they had never met before. Like Robert Stevens, who lived next door to that house in Kane for 42 years.

Or Evelyn and James Waldner, who accepted us into their home and talked openly and honestly about what it’s like to lose a child. They know that loss. Nearly two years before the Kane fire, their daughter, Kezia, drowned in the pond on their neighbours’ property two weeks before her fourth birthday.

Then there’s the other part of the assignment, the part that requires you to get it right. To find the words to articulate the anguish a tight-knit community is feeling. To find the words when there are none.

That was my challenge again a week later, covering the Froese boys’ funeral in Winkler. It was sad and surreal. A funeral for four.

Covering a funeral requires sensitivity. It’s an intrusion, to be sure. Many readers were upset with me for even attending, calling it tasteless and a way to sell papers. I understand this position, but I disagree with it. Stories such as this are far-reaching, and the grief ripples outward. The private becomes public. The Froese funeral was standing room only. People from all over the province wanted to mourn those four boys who, at ages 9, 10, 12 and 15, had so much in front of them.

On our way back to the city, Ruth and I went to the site where they are laid to rest. Four impossibly small mounds of dirt, made smaller by the vast ocean of prairie surrounding them. It was there that I finally took a moment. I wasn’t on assignment just then. I was just someone paying my respects.

I think of those Froese boys often.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @JenZoratti