From MemoryArchive
Who: Kurran Ochwat
What: Hockey Spectator Dies
When: 16 March, 2002
Where: Nationwide Arena
I was a pretty big hockey fan growing up in
Columbus, Ohio even though we never had a professional hockey team for most of my life. There was a minor league hockey team, the Columbus Chill that played at the
Ohio State Fair grounds. The stadium was not very big which made every game exciting. You felt a part of the game from every seat in the house. All seats were less than $12 a piece. This was back in the day where smoking was not prohibited in stadiums and there were no limits on to how much beer could be consumed per person. The majority of my memories surrounding the Columbus Chill was watching hockey in a smoke-filled stadium full of drunk people. There were more fights in the crowd than on the ice. Games were always exciting for you never knew what you were going to see. Unfortunately the Columbus Chill relocated its hockey team to make way for the NHL team, the
Columbus Blue Jackets.
My first Columbus Blue Jacket game was a horrible experience. I remember it vividly.
We were playing the Detroit Redwings on March 16th, 2002 and 4 of my friends and I had pretty decent seats sitting behind the goal at the
Nationwide Arena when a slamming slapshot flew out into the crowd at over 80 mph toward us and smashed into the head of a 13 year old girl sitting several rows up. Play immediately stopped and a crowd of spectators crowded over the child. The whole crowd went silent and watched in horror as the medics attended to the little girl. Play resumed as she was evacuated out of the stadium and taken to
Children’s Hospital. Thirteen-year-old Brittanie Cecil died two days later after she was released from the hospital from a rare clotting of an artery and bruising to the brain that was unnoticed. Every game that I have attended after that, I pay my respects to the poor girl who had her life ended by a freak accident.
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