VANCOUVER—The last time Teresa Sankey spoke to her daughter was seven years ago this Saturday.It was a warm evening, with plenty of summer sun left in the sky. Saoirse Sankey called her mom from a pay phone at Bob’s Service Centre on Highway 17 just east of Sudbury, Ont. Saoirse was on a “walkabout,” a family tradition seeing children travel the country alone and mostly on foot when they reach the age of 20. She’d already made it from Vancouver to Newfoundland. She was on her way home.Teresa and Saoirse talked of the future. Saoirse was worried about her grandmother’s failing health and planned to stop in Kelowna to help. She wanted to pick grapes at a commercial vineyard to ease the financial burden on her grandfather. At 6:41 p.m., she told her mom she loved her and hung up the phone.At 6:45 p.m., she was hit by a truck.Saoirse was killed Aug. 31, 2012 while walking along the side of the highway. The moment was captured by the gas station’s security cameras.“We saw her leaving the service station, walking. As a pedestrian she was walking safely three to four feet away from the fog line,” Teresa said.“You see a truck hurtling past at one point, and then you just see a cloud of dust.”On Saturday, Teresa and Saoirse’s sister Freyja will stand at the spot where Saoirse was killed. They make the annual pilgrimage from Vancouver to Ontario every year, trying to raise awareness about the dangers of distracted driving and push for harsher penalties when such carelessness causes death.At the time of her daughter’s death, the punishment for distracted driving in Ontario was far more lenient. That’s changed, but Teresa said that if the crash happened in B.C., even now the driver would get barely a rap on the knuckles.The driver who killed Saoirse was 18 at the time. According to local media reports, he pleaded guilty to careless driving in Sudbury traffic court and was fined $1,000. He ap ...
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