A high school in Charlottetown played a memorial game of catch Monday to honour two promising baseball players who were gunned down in a horrific murder-suicide in Alberta last week.
Dozens of staff and students put on baseball gloves and played on a field near Colonel Gray High School, where Tanner Craswell, 22, and friend Mitch MacLean, 20, once studied.
"There's a lot of students who know them through baseball and they know them through family and friends and the connections throughout the community," said principal Kevin Whitrow, who organized the memorial as a tribute to reflect the two players' life passion.
Whitrow noted that faculty and students have been shaken by the tragedy, and that by organizing a game of catch, locals were allowed to do "whatever they feel like doing" during unique memorial.
The tribute took place four days after Craswell and MacLean -- along with 21-year-old Tabitha Stepple -- were killed on a highway near Lethbridge, Alta., allegedly by Stepple's ex-boyfriend Derek Jensen.
Craswell and MacLean were being driven to the airport so they could fly home to Prince Edward Island.
The driver of the car, Shayna Conway, 21, was shot several times but is expected to survive. At the end of the rampage, Jensen fatally shot himself.
Conway described to police the gruesome details of what took place on Thursday morning after Jensen allegedly rammed her car on the highway, forcing her to stop.
The lone survivor said she pulled over after the crash and got out to see what had happened, when she was shot several times.
Still conscious, Conway told police she then watched as the shooter fired his weapon into the car, killing her friends before fatally shooting himself.
"She told police she crawled to a cell phone and called 911. We understand she has suffered extensive injuries but she is expected to make a full recovery," CTV Calgary's Sage Pullen said.
It's expected that Conway will make a full physical recovery.
Earlier in the night the group ran into Jensen at a pub, where he reportedly became agitated and pushed Stepple. The pair had recently broken up, but were still living together.
Jensen was in the process of moving to Edmonton. Then later in the evening, they again bumped into Jensen at a convenience store.
Friends of Jensen say they were shocked to learn of the allegations against the 21-year-old, including police reports that he was carrying three loaded weapons with him on the night the shootings took place.
"Friends of Jensen are telling us this is certainly not the person they knew, that he was from a large family, that he was training to be an EMT, wanting to move to Edmonton to get a fresh start," Pullen said.
"They say he was quite heartbroken after this break-up, the couple living together for about six months, and they say he was very upset about this but certainly they say they had no indication he could turn violent."
Whitrow, who knew both boys, said he got the idea on Friday morning when friends shared stories about how Tanner Craswell would always play catch with his younger brothers, regardless of the weather.
"My reaction was that I felt like doing that myself. It seemed like a way that I wanted to respond to this," Whitrow said in an earlier interview with 麻豆影视.
The goal, he said, is to "honour the boys and let them know that we cared about them."
With a report from The Canadian Press
