By David Waldstein
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 tragic accident 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. Matthew was 29. His wife is expecting their first child in December.
The 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 accident 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 two funerals on Monday.
“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. 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 him — 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, 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.
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 New Jersey, 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.”
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.”
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.”
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 ago. 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.
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