The sudden death of the Gaudreau brothers

On the narrow shoulder of County Route 551, a two-lane road in the heart of rural Salem County, New Jersey, a memorial appears suddenly among the fields of corn and soybeans. Bunched together are bouquets of flowers, miniature flags and dozens of hockey sticks: an incongruous signpost to a tragedy that shattered two extended families and left a community bereft.

“It just couldn’t be any worse,” said Lee Ware, a local farmer who was once commissioner for Salem County and a local high school baseball coach of 46 years. He knows both families. “I’ve lived here my whole life, and I know everyone in the county feels the same way. This is a rough one.”

On Aug. 29, about an hour after the sun had set, John Gaudreau, an All-Star forward in the NHL, and his younger brother, Matthew Gaudreau, a former professional hockey player and coach at nearby Gloucester Catholic High School, were struck and killed by a driver as they went for a bike ride near their parents’ home. They were preparing for their sister’s wedding in Philadelphia the next day.

John was 31, married with two children, one born in 2022 and another in February. His wife, Meredith, said at his funeral Monday that she is pregnant with the couple’s third child. Matthew was 29. His wife is expecting their first child in December.

New Jersey State Police arrested and charged Sean M. Higgins, 43, of Woodstown, New Jersey, a small village about 10 miles from the site of the collision where the memorial now sits. Similar memorials have popped up wherever John or Matthew Gaudreau played hockey: in Calgary, Alberta; in Columbus, Ohio; in Boston; and at the Hollydell Ice Arena in Sewell, New Jersey, where the brothers skated as boys.

According to the police complaint, Higgins failed a sobriety test and admitted to drinking “five or six beers” before getting behind the wheel of his Jeep Grand Cherokee. He will remain in a nearby jail, at least until a pretrial hearing Friday, while the Gaudreau family postponed the wedding of their daughter, Katie, and instead arranged for her brothers’ funerals.

“You keep asking yourself: ‘Why? Why did this have to happen?’” said Jerry York, who coached the brothers at Boston College. “There are no good answers.”

The Gaudreau brothers and Higgins all grew up in the same county, a verdant swath of New Jersey south of Philadelphia, where lush fields of grain surround small towns connected by two-lane roads. All three were athletes and seemingly all-American boys. Higgins, about a dozen years older, was a star high school baseball player and later joined the Army National Guard.

John and Matty — as their family called them — grew up about 10 miles farther west, in Oldmans Township. They were undersized but amply skilled young hockey stars who learned the game from their father, Guy Gaudreau, a former hockey player originally from Vermont. He coached at Hollydell Ice Arena and at Gloucester Catholic, where the boys went to high school and where Matty had returned to follow in his dad’s footsteps as coach.

‘Tight Relationship’

John was the superstar of the family and the entire region, a hockey prodigy who stunned onlookers with his dazzling puck handling and skating, even when he was just 9 years old.

“You couldn’t take your eyes off him,” said Vince Malts, who played for Guy Gaudreau and later spent a decade in various minor hockey leagues, and now is a mental-performance coach in the NHL. Malts was on Guy Gaudreau’s under-14 team when John was born, in 1993, and over the years was struck by how often he saw him on the ice at Hollydell, either with Matty or by himself. The boys were usually the smallest but had the largest skill set.

Size was always the thing the Gaudreau boys had to overcome. Malts remembers the day John tried out for an under-15 team. At one point, according to Malts, three bigger opponents converged on John at the same time and flattened him. Malts overheard several coaches and scouts behind him complain that John was too small to make it big.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘But did you see the pass he made?’” Malts said. “Right as he gets taken out, he made this incredible no-look pass to another kid who had an easy breakaway, and Johnny pops right back up. You had to look beyond his size.”

John had more skill, but Matty was a terrific player, too, and although 16 months younger, Matty often seemed like the older brother, according to York, the Boston College coach. When John and his parents made his official visit to Boston, Matty joined them. Toward the end of the visit, in York’s office, John turned to his younger brother for counsel.

“I remember Matty saying, ‘This is where we should go, John,’” York recounted, “and John said, ‘All right, we’ll go to BC.’ They had that special kind of tight relationship.”

John scored 21 goals in his freshman year in 2011-12, the last one a spectacular late-third-period backhand flip to ice the national championship game. After his sophomore year, he could have left to turn professional, but he stayed at Boston College for two more years to play with Matty.

“They were always together,” York said, “shooting pucks after practice, going to dinner together. It was a joy to have them, and their parents, too.”

Matty spent four years at BC and then became a prospect for the New York Islanders while John was already an established star for the Calgary Flames. (John signed with the Columbus Blue Jackets two years ago.) Curtis Lazar, now a forward with the Devils, was teammates with John in Calgary for three seasons, beginning in 2017. He said John’s skill was obvious. But what many did not see was the humble personality and happy outlook that drew people to John.

‘Super Nice to Everyone’

“I’ll never forget, one night I met a bunch of my friends in Calgary, and what do you know, Johnny Hockey walks in,” Lazar recalled. “Their jaws hit the ground. But he never acted like a big shot.” After that encounter, Lazar’s friends could not believe what a regular guy John was. “Just super nice to everyone.”

When Lazar heard about the accident last week, he was scheduled to practice with some of his Devils teammates in Newark, New Jersey. They couldn’t bring themselves to do it, not for a few days. “It’s still hard,” Lazar said Wednesday, almost a week later. “I can only imagine what it must be like for the guys in Columbus that called him a current teammate.”

At a recent memorial for the Gaudreau brothers at the Blue Jackets’ arena in Columbus, Erik Gudbranson, a 6-foot-5 defenseman for the Blue Jackets, told a group of fans that his and his teammates’ hearts were “shattered in a million pieces.” He recounted the story of how he would grab John in a bear hug and refuse to let go until John told Gudbranson that he loved him.

“He wouldn’t tell me for a long time,” Gudbranson said to a crowd gathered for the ceremony. “I know now it was because he enjoyed the hugs.”

Players across the league have expressed shock and grief. Cole Caulfield, a 5-foot-7 forward for the Montreal Canadiens, changed his jersey number from 22 to 13, in honor of John Gaudreau, Caufield’s idol.

It’s about 10 miles from Oldmans Township to Woodstown, a little longer if you drive by the Cowtown Rodeo, known as the oldest weekly professional rodeo in the United States. With a mixture of Philly accents and Jersey muscle, people here take pride in the hardworking farming life. They are also proud of the Gaudreaus and quick to mention Jonathan Taylor, a star running back for the Indianapolis Colts, who grew up in Salem.

Most everyone in the county seemed to know of the Gaudreau family, and many knew Higgins, too. Most recently, Higgins worked at Gaudenzia, a substance treatment provider just across the state line in Pennsylvania. (Gaudenzia said in a statement that it had placed Higgins on leave after his arrest.)

John Hollinger, a retired police officer in Woodstown, said everyone in the area was talking about the accident and the agony of the Gaudreau family. But they also acknowledged the burden for Higgins’ family.

“By all accounts, he’s a nice guy who made a terrible mistake,” Hollinger said at Gus’s Pizzeria, on South Main Street in Woodstown. “You feel so bad for everybody, especially the Gaudreaus, when you think about how they were getting ready for their sister’s wedding. Just crushing.”

Ware, the retired county commissioner and baseball coach, called Higgins “a great guy,” who was captain of the Woodstown High School baseball team when Ware was the coach. He also knew the Gaudreaus from when he helped get John into the Salem Sports Hall of Fame in 2017.

“An outstanding family,” Ware said. “Both families.”

On Thursday, Higgins appeared in a brief court hearing via video conference call from the Salem County Correctional Facility. In an email, his lawyer, Matthew Portella, declined to comment except to say that the situation was “a tragedy involving a great deal of emotion and impacting many individuals.”

Back at the memorial at the site of the crash, Harry Fraint Jr., a heavy-equipment operator from nearby Carneys Point, rode up on his bicycle. He had never met the Gaudreaus, he said, although he did recall seeing Higgins play baseball years go. He described how he had teared up when he heard the news of the brothers’ deaths. Then he pushed off to continue on his ride along that road.

But he circled back. As he gazed down at the flowers and hockey equipment on the grass, he rang the bell on his bike.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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