Good Samaritan who died in crash remembered as selfless

Garrett Thiessen was in a Winkler grocery store Thursday when a man approached him to talk about his father.

Alvin Thiessen was one of two victims killed in a crash along a southwestern Manitoba highway on March 6. His family says he was a man who rarely talked about himself and never sought recognition for the many initiatives he supported.

The man who approached Garrett said he had heard plenty about Alvin, listing the many things he had been involved in.

Garrett, who now lives in Vancouver, recognized some of them and learned about others during the conversation.

One comment stuck with him.

“But you know what? I never met him,” Garrett recalled the man saying.

“He left a mark on people, but a lot of people didn’t even know him, just knew his name.”

It’s how Alvin would have wanted to be remembered, his family said in an interview with the Free Press on Thursday, the eve of the 73 year old’s funeral. He was someone who helped many and asked for little.

Alvin was a lifelong Winkler resident who started WBS Construction with his brother Harv in 1979.

His selfless spirit — something family members said he carried throughout his personal and professional life — has given Garrett and Alvin’s younger son, Arlen, some measure of comfort in their grief.

“This may seem odd, but at the end of the day, he died trying to help someone else,” Garrett said. “And that is very, very typical of him. So as hard as it is, I think it’s how he would have wanted to go. In some odd way, it wasn’t wildly surprising to me.”

Alvin had stopped, along with another truck, after coming across a man — 44-year-old Samuel James-Decker — and his three children whose vehicle had slid off Highway 428 into a snowy ditch about 10 kilometres north of Winkler.

A 17-year-old female, who was driving a southbound vehicle about 7:30 p.m that night, didn’t immediately recognize that the trucks had stopped on the road.

Her vehicle clipped one of the trucks and she went into the ditch, hitting both men and crashing into the back of James-Decker’s car, RCMP said.

The children were not hurt and neither was the driver of the second vehicle who stopped. RCMP say the investigation is ongoing and no charges have been laid.

Garrett received a phone call from his mother, Carol, after she learned of the crash. Calls from mom were not unusual but were almost always preceded by a text message.

“She thinks I’m busy or whatever,” Garrett said, with Arlen agreeing.

The calls both brothers received that night came without warning.

“I knew something was wrong,” Garrett said, recalling the rare times something similar had happened, including when his grandfather and one of his closest friends died.

Garrett was at home in Vancouver when he got the call. Arlen, a Winkler police officer, was on duty when his phone rang.

“I had to get my mom,” Arlen said of his first thought. “She said she was OK, but I needed to go.”

He called his fellow officers a “phenomenal group” who rushed to support him when he needed it most, getting him to the scene as quickly as they could.

“And we went from there, and we’ve been going ever since,” he said.

While they’re thinking of Dad, they’re also thinking of the teen involved in the collision.

“This 17-year-old girl, her life has been changed forever,” Garrett said. “And she is going to need more support, far more support, than our family is going to need, because she is going to have to figure out how to reconcile this in her head.”

Garrett said the Thiessen family isn’t angry with her.

“This was an accident,” he said. “And I hope there is a day our family can go to her and say, ‘Hey, we forgive you. You got to find a way to be OK.”

Arlen said if the roles were reversed and his father was in his shoes, he would have supported the young girl.

Guided by his Christian faith, Alvin was also a longtime member of Winkler Bergthaler Mennonite Church.

“He was very involved in ministry,” the church’s pastor, Dean Huber, said. “It was an incredible the impact that he had on people’s lives around us.”

Like so much else in his life, Alvin preferred to avoid the spotlight. Instead, he quietly offered advice and mentorship to those who sought it.

“He would never want me to say this about him, he was just that type of a person,” Huber said, chuckling.

scott.billeck@freepress.mb.ca