‘Toughest day’: Witnesses of fatal Laval daycare bus crash reflect one year later

This week marks one year since a city bus crashed into a daycare in Laval, killing two children and seriously injuring six others.

Several witnesses responded within minutes and even seconds, helping children and making sure the driver didn’t get away. Feb. 8 2023 is engraved in their minds.

“I was there, I was dropping off my kid like every morning and the whole thing happened in front of my eyes,” said parent of a now three-year-old, André Beaudoin. “It was a toughest day of my life.”

“You can never expect a day like that to happen, to see a bus hit a daycare and just do what you got to do and try to save those lives,” said Beaudoin. “I still have those sounds in my head still a year after and it was that yelling of the kids that were under the bus and it’s still pretty hard.”

Several people, including Beaudoin, had to restrain the driver after he got off the bus as he seemed delirious. He said it was a shock, but also a time to immediately act.

Hamdi Ben Chabaane lives right next door from the daycare and jumped in to help.

“I was in the living room, we heard the loud noise when the bus hit the daycare so I went straight out,” he said. “I saw a friend named Mike, he was trying to open the door to get the driver out, we put him on the ground and from there we started looking if we can find children under the bus, it was very quick but it remains in my memory.”

Pierre Ny St-Amand faces nine charges, including two counts of first-degree murder. The daycare has since added concrete barriers to the front of the building.

The parents of Maëva David, one of the children killed that day, said she was a “ray of sunshine who loved life.”

The child was identified in a letter sent by her parents to various francophone media outlets on Feb. 13, 2023.

They wrote she was “bursting with energy” but also capable of “profound attention and calm.”

The mother of four-year-old Jacob Gauthier, the other child killed when the bus crashed into the daycare, found a unique way to remember her son in August – she she has decorated a trail in memory of him.

On social media, Marie-Christine Cloutier shared that Jacob loved the trail in question and liked to go there when possible.

In her publication on social media, which she since made private, Cloutier shared her sadness and invited others to join her in placing “rocks painted with love” to the trail.

Hearing for bus driver

St-Amand’s preliminary hearing is set to begin March 25. Prosecutors have said they plan to call 10 witnesses – civilians, a psychiatrist, and members of the accused’s family – during the four-day hearing.

His defence lawyer plans to challenge those two charges on the grounds that his client did not have the necessary criminal intent.

The hearing will determine whether there is enough evidence to proceed to trial.

The 51-year-old St-Amand remains detained at Montreal’s Institut Philippe-Pinel.

Beaudoin and Ben Chabaane are among the witnesses set to testify.

“To keep on going, living your day to day to day, you just have to think that you were there for a reason,” Beaudoin said.

The heroes of the attack now forever bonded over what they went through.

“Life has since come back to normal, we were able to forget,” Ben Chabaane said. “It always comes back but as soon as the daycare reopened its doors and we see the children every day, life continues normally.”

“It’s always going to be in my head,” said Beaudoin. “It’s there every day, something you have to live with.”