‘I just feel their pain’

A Winnipeg woman says she’s doing everything she can to support her three children after they witnessed their father die in a fatal crash near Winkler last week.

“I’m hanging in there,” Miriam James-Decker told the Free Press on Thursday.

Her children — aged 13, 10 and five — were in the vehicle with their father, 44-year-old Samuel James-Decker on March 6 around 7:30 p.m.

The vehicle slid off Highway 428 into a snowy ditch about 10 kilometres north of Winkler.

He got out of the vehicle and a 73-year-old man, who has been identified as Alvin Thiessen of Winkler, stopped to help out the stranded family.

RCMP said the drivers of two trucks had stopped on the southbound lane of the two-lane highway to offer assistance.

A 17-year-old female, who was driving a southbound vehicle, 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 Samuel’s car, RCMP said.

Samuel had picked up his children from Miriam, his ex-wife, in Winnipeg, and was taking them to his house in Winkler for the weekend. Road conditions were icy at the time, RCMP said.

Miriam says she received a panicked phone call from her 13-year-old daughter after the collision.

“I picked it up and it was my daughter screaming into the phone, hysterically,” Miriam said Thursday.

“She said something happened. She said that dad got stuck in the snow. He tried to go outside of the car to get us out, then another car came along and just hit us. And now dad is unconscious on the ground, and this other man that was helping us is also unconscious on the ground, and I don’t know what to do.”

The three children were not hurt.

“It seems to me that they’re holding it together quite a bit,” Miriam said about her children. “I’m actually amazed how well they seem to be handling it, but we are also trying to keep them distracted.”

The children have yet to return to school, she said.

“They’ve said a few times that they’re ready to go back, but then they change their minds,” Miriam said. “I’m not sure when they’ll actually feel ready to go back.”

Miriam said nothing can prepare a parent to deal with such a tragedy.

“I just feel their pain,” she said. “It just hurts so much. And just knowing I’m the only biological parent left for them. The reality of the situation is just setting in.”

Samuel and Miriam met in 2005 and were married in 2011. They separated in 2021.

Samuel was originally from Sierra Leone and moved to Canada in the early 2000s.

“He worked as a direct support worker for people with developmental disabilities,” Miriam said. “He worked in a group home. He had a very special gift for these people. He was very good.”

She said Samuel also had a way with animals, who “loved him,” and he was a good father.

“He was very hands-on with the kids, helping them do their homework. He was very affectionate,” she said, describing him as a fun-loving man who joked around.

He loved sports, especially soccer, and was passionate about his home country.

She said Samuel would collect donated items to be shipped to orphanages in Sierra Leone.

“The children of Sierra Leone, and the future of the country, was always on his mind,” she said.

Miriam made a point of praising Thiessen for stopping to help out.

“Just knowing that he died while trying to help my family is quite something,” she said. “Just big feelings about that.”

RCMP said Thursday the investigation into the collision is ongoing, and no charges have been laid.

Miriam, who is from Winkler, said she’s travelled on the highway where the collision took place many times and believes it’s dangerous in the winter.

“It’s very poorly lit, there’s no shoulder, just gravel, and I know of other fatal accidents that have happened on that stretch of highway,” she said.

scott.billeck@freepress.mb.ca