Counselors assist grieving students at Madawaska school

MADAWASKA – Nine counselors were available to students at Madawaska Middle-High School Monday to help them cope with the death of one of their classmates over the weekend.

Kenny Sirois, 16, a star athlete and National Honor Society student at Madawaska High School, collapsed and died at about 9:30 p.m. Friday near the end of a jogging stint with his twin brother.

Sirois collapsed just before getting to the family home at the corner of 23rd Avenue and Fox Street.

Efforts were made at the scene to resuscitate the athlete. He was pronounced dead at the Edmundston, New Brunswick, Regional Hospital.

“The entire junior class [of which Kenny Sirois was a member] was taken into the school library this morning just to let them talk,” Principal Conrad Cyr said Monday afternoon. “Most of them could not get together on the weekend, and we thought it was a good idea to let them talk.

“It’s getting better for them as the day goes on,” Cyr said. “I believe it is helping them out.”

Nine counselors from the school, The Aroostook Mental Health Center, Community High School at Fort Kent and Wisdom High School at St. Agatha are helping students and staff members in the grieving process.

Sirois, a 6-foot-3-inch 220-pound athlete, was one of the basketball stars that took the Owls basketball team to their first-ever Eastern Maine High School tournament appearance this spring.

Sirois also played baseball for the Madawaska High School Owls, played soccer and participated in track before coming to Madawaska from Corinna and South Carolina. The family moved to Madawaska when the twins were sixth-graders.

Vincent and Wendy Sirois said their son died of a flaw in his heart. They described it as an enlarged or hypertrophic left ventricle. Doctors told them Sunday the condition could not have been foreseen.

“This is just devastating, just devastating,” Matt Rossignol, Sirois’ basketball coach at Madawaska High School, said Sunday. “This is just awful for the family, his classmates at school and for the town. This was a complete shock to me.

“He, and his brother Mark were just a coach’s dream,” he said. “He always put the team ahead of his own personal gain and was a reason Madawaska went to the tournament.”

Rossignol, who also taught Sirois, said the young man was always respectful in the classroom and on the court.

Kenny and Mark, who used their twin instincts on the basketball court to outwit others, were looking forward to bringing the Owls back to the Eastern Maine Tournament next winter, according to Rossignol.

Earlier Friday, Kenny and his brother had gone to baseball practice, played a few games of basketball on their own and had gone out jogging, running and sprinting, his parents said.

“He often stopped under the streetlight across the street saying he needed the rest,” Wendy Sirois said of her son. “They sprinted, they ran hard. It wasn’t only jogging.”

Vincent Sirois, an educational technician at Madawaska High School, said the “family was blessed to have had him in our life.

“He hit a home run during his last regular season game at Madawaska,” Sirois said of his son. “It was the highlight of the season for him.

“He was just a wonderful kid,” the grieving father said.

Bruce Pelletier, a police officer in Madawaska and one of the first emergency personnel at the scene, said the two brothers had been seen by other teens while they jogged.

“The kids saw them and waved at them as they went by,” Pelletier said Sunday. “The kids saw him bent over a little further down, and just thought he was tired from running.”

Mark had run home, arriving before his brother. Going back to see where he was, Mark found his brother on the ground on Jack Young’s lawn, Pelletier said.