Young girls from a Southern California youth hockey team were left traumatized after a team road trip turned into a nightmare in Colorado, killing one player’s father and sending multiple children and adults to the hospital.
Parents at The Cube Ice and Entertainment Center in Valencia — the team’s home rink — struggled to explain the devastating crash to their daughters as the Santa Clarita Valley community reeled from the tragedy.
”She was distraught,” team hockey dad Serge Zarubin said of his daughter’s reaction. ”It’s understandable. It’s hard for them. It’s hard on grownups. It’s even harder for the kids.”
”It hits everybody hard — it’s just so tragic. There is a child without a parent now,” Santa Clarita Valley hockey mom Kelly Lytle said. ”It’s just really disheartening to think about those families.”
The crash happened just before 9 a.m. Thursday on a snowy stretch of Interstate 70 in Clear Creek County, about 55 miles west of Denver, according to CPR News and NBC.
A Sprinter van carrying the Santa Clarita Lady Flyers — a 12-and-under girls ice hockey team — collided head-on with a Colorado Department of Transportation snowplow as the team traveled to a Western Girls Hockey League tournament near Denver.
The impact was so violent that the snowplow’s blade was ripped off and the van was flipped off the side of the interstate. Authorities identified the driver — the father of one of the players — as the sole fatality. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Of the 10 people aboard the van, eight were injured, according to reports.
Several juvenile players were hurt, including one girl who was airlifted by helicopter to a nearby trauma center in critical condition. Seven other passengers — four children and three adults — were transported by ambulance to area hospitals, CPR News reported.
The van had been rented by three families from the team to get the girls to the tournament, KTLA reported.
”This is the kind of thing you hear about on the news, but it’s never someone you know or people you know,” Prescott Littlefield, president of the Santa Clarita Flyers, told NBC. ‘It just completely knocked me back, knocked the wind out of me.’
In a statement posted to Instagram after the crash, the hockey club asked for privacy and prayers.
”Our 12AA Lady Flyers were on their way to Denver, Colorado, to participate in a WGHL weekend,’ the team wrote. ‘We ask that you keep our hockey families in your prayers and that you give them time to sort through the details of this tragic event.”
While the girl airlifted to the hospital remains in critical condition, the four other children injured in the crash have since been released.
Of the three adults hospitalized, two remain in serious condition, while the third is listed in fair condition.