"I am devastated": Neville-Lake crash site memorial removed without notice

Yorkregion.com
May 6, 2018
Jeremy Grimaldi

Where once there stood a Christmas tree, teddy bears, crosses and even a bicycle, there now remains nothing.

Nary a sign of the September 2015 crash that wrought so much heartache on one family, claiming the lives of three Neville-Lake children and their grandfather.

It began as a gesture of human kindness at the corner of Kirby Road and Kipling Avenue, near Kleinburg, where Jennifer Neville-Lake's three children Daniel, 9, Harrison, 5 and Milly, 2, along with her father Gary Neville, 65, lost their lives.

Now, without any notice, it's all gone.

Reacting on Facebook on Saturday night, Jennifer Neville-Lake expressed her emotions about the incident.

"I am devastated," she wrote. "The crash site memorial where so many wonderful and kind people leave flowers for my family is gone. Everything. Oh God."

She then expressed her wish to potentially buy the land so the family could place a memorial at the site.

"If the city had an issue then I would have hoped they would have told me so I had a chance to remove the items," she added. "If I could buy the land and put a plaque there I would in a heartbeat. I am heartbroken. Why???"

Since the post first went up, garnering comments and reaction, Neville-Lake added two edits, figuring Vaughan City workers conducted a clean-up following the wind storm that wreaked so much havoc across the GTA on Friday night.

"If it was the storm then it filled in the holes where the crosses, bike and sign were. There is no debris or anything left."

A second edit said she was going back to the site on Sunday and thanked well-wishers for the comments and support.

"Ed and I have been up all night worrying that perhaps we missed the items somehow and it was the wind," she said. "Fingers crossed that I find them! Here is hoping it was the wind..."

Despite requests for comment, the City of Vaughan had not responded by publication time.

The children's grandmother, Neriza Neville, and great-grandmother, Josefina Frias, were also seriously hurt.

Marco Muzzo who was sentenced to 10 years in jail in March 2016 for impaired driving in the crash, has been moved to a minimum security prison and will be eligible for full parole May 9, 2019.