VANCOUVER, British Columbia – A father—and the Mounties—are trying to find witnesses to a suspected “ski rage” attack that left a teenager with a bullet-sized hole in his skull.
Father David Keir says his son Max, 13, swerved to avoid a man in a yellow ski jacket while at Grouse Mountain in North Vancouver, British Columbia, on March 30, the CBC reports. Keir believes the man was angered by the near-collision and says he rammed his ski pole toward Max “with such significant force that it went all the way through his skull and into his brain.”
Max received a few stitches afterward, but his family didn’t realize the extent of the injury until that evening, when he was rushed to a hospital after becoming dazed and vomiting. Doctors performed emergency surgery after discovering the ski pole had gone more than an inch into his brain.
“There were bone fragments and a pool of blood in his brain,” Keir said at an RCMP news conference Wednesday. “When doctors showed me that image, you freak out as a parent.”
He says Max is slowly recovering and can now attend school for an hour a day. The Mounties say that with “all available investigational avenues” exhausted, they don’t have enough evidence to say whether the incident was deliberate or accidental, though Keir believes it is definitely the former, the Vancouver Sun reports.
“Someone is out there with big time anger issues,” he says. “Maybe that person will do the right thing and come forward or, at the very least, get some help.” (Read more Canada stories.)
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