The funeral services will be carried out this weekend in several communities in the west of Ontario for the five victims of a multiple vehicle collision that sent pain waves throughout the region.
Four adolescents from the Community School of the Walkerton district were traveling home with their teacher on Friday afternoon after a softball tournament east of London, Ontario, when they were involved in an accident with a transport truck.
Rowan McLeod, Kaydance Ford, Danica Baker, Olivia Rourke and Mat Eckert were killed. Their deaths were recognized throughout Canada, even by Prime Minister Mark Carney, who wrote that it was an “unimaginable loss that no family, no classmate, no school should have to endure.”
The Provincial Police of Ontario said Thursday that they continue to investigate what happened on the Rural Highway, where a two -road stop is crossed with a busiest road.
The commemorative ads published this week offered a window to the life of young women who are being remembered for their love for sport, their many “best friends” and the care they felt for their brothers and cousins.
“Our world changed forever on Friday, May 23, 2025, when our beloved Kaydance Lynne Ford suddenly died with only 16 years,” the Ford family wrote, who said his daughter stood out in athletics and tents classes at school.
Rowen’s favorite color was pink, and his family asked people to use it on Sunday at Chesley Arena for a commemorative monument. That little city, north of Walkerton in Bruce County, will be the two funeral site, with a meeting on Saturday at Chesley Ball Diamond to remember Kaydance.
Earlier on Saturday, a joint service will be carried out for Olivia and Danica at the Walkerton Community Center.
Olivia’s family remembers her as a light in her lives, “full of goodness, laughs, dance, song and love,” they wrote in a statement. “His absence leaves a vacuum that will never be filled and always remembered.”
Hundreds of people lit candles and marked a moment of silence in a vigil outside school in the days after the accident, and many people express the importance of being together to cry.
“It is an incredibly deep and deep scar that this has inflicted our community. It will take a long time,” said Chris Peabody, mayor of Brockton, which includes Walkerton.
Remember professor
While the students of the school where teenagers attended they receive pain advice, the staff also cried a colleague who, they said, brought laugh to the staff room and “whose presence marked the difference.”
Eckert, 33, was not only a teacher and a coach, said his family, but someone whose dedication to the service was evident in everything he did.
“His mathematics lessons were more than just numbers: they were moments of connection. He took the time to truly see his students and athletes, often using his pauses for lunch to build relationships, offer breath and remember others his value,” his family wrote.
Known for his friends as “Ecky”, some shirts from the Northstar Lacrosse team hung Orange, where he was coach, on his front porch.
His funeral will take place on Sunday at an Owen Sound high school, where his family suggested that we would have wanted people to wear “tracksuit pants in socks and cozy footwear.”
To commemorate the interest of adolescents in sports, three families asked that donations be made to several local teams, including aerial gymnastics, bromball, minor hockey and baseball. The Ford family had also established a scholarship at the Walkerton school in the name of Danica.
