OTTAWA -- For Karen Benvie, the pain is just as raw as it was one year ago.
“They say it gets easier because you learn to live with it, but it doesn’t get easier,” Benvie says.
Her mother, Judy Booth, was one of three people killed when an OC Transpo bus crashed at Westboro station on Jan. 11, 2019.
The bus driver, Aissatou Diallo, faces 38 charges. The city and OC Transpo were cleared of criminal wrongdoing.
This week the city issued a memo saying it accepted civil responsibility.
Benvie is frustrated that she and others still don’t have any idea what went so wrong that day.
"We don’t know why it happened"
“A year later they’re still not taking any responsibility for their inaction to make changes,” Benvie says. “It’s hard because we still don’t know, we don’t have any answers, we don’t know why it happened…we don’t know what happened to our mom. We’re not allowed to know.”
With so much of their pain shared so publicly over the last year, Benvie and her sister will mark the anniversary of the tragic crash out of town together.
“A lot of our grieving has been done very publicly and we just need a few moments of privacy.”
One way Benvie is honouring her mother is by finishing a cross stitching project Booth started.
“She was an awesome mom, a great grandmother,” Benvie says. “She worked really hard, she was a loving wife, she was everybody’s everything and the world is a little bit smaller without her.”
