Happy birthday, Aiden: Red balloons fill St. Thomas for boy killed in crash
Global News
Monday, July 10 marks what would have been Aiden Curtis's 12th birthday. The community of St. Thomas, Ont., is doing its part to recognize it.
From business entrances, to front porches, to apartment balconies and more, red balloons can be spotted throughout St. Thomas, Ont., on Monday as the community unites to mark what would have been Aiden Curtis’s 12th birthday.
Curtis was killed and four others were injured, including one woman critically, when five pedestrians were struck by a pickup truck that left the roadway and entered a sidewalk on Tuesday afternoon.
“You can drive through the town of Saint Thomas right now and just physically see the love and support that this family has been given in such a tragic time,” Shelley Summers, who performs as Dotsy the Clown, said Monday.
Summers says Curtis would come into her shop, Dotsy’s Entertainment Co., often around Halloween and he was counting down until he could volunteer in their haunted house.
After learning of the red balloon initiative last week, she says she wanted to find a way to help. She and some other performers pooled their red balloons together and then she posted on Facebook that they’d sell them $10 for 12 balloons in order to cover the cost of helium.
“Within 45 minutes, we had 50 orders come in,” she said.
“Sunday morning we started inflating at 7 a.m. and we inflated 600… We had run out of helium because 600 balloons is one entire tank of helium. We took the rest of the red balloons and just sat them in the mailbox. So there was probably 100 and 150 or so left over. And we put those in the mailbox last night at 6:00, and this morning they were all gone as well.”
A popular Facebook page for community members was filled with posts on Monday, showing red balloons at homes, offices, police headquarters, apartment buildings, and more.
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