Tolkkinen: Car-crash deaths of two young people send Battle Lake reeling

BATTLE LAKE, Minn. - The signs are there if you know where to look. Two bouquets of flowers lying just outside the door of Bev's Donut Shop in the falling snow. The announcement, affixed to the glass doors of Larry's Foods, that the grocery store would close for several hours on Saturday to allow staff time to attend a funeral.

This city of less than a thousand people in Otter Tail County is reeling from the loss of two of its young people in separate car crashes a day apart.

Last Thursday, Cadence Hartman, 18, who graduated from Battle Lake High School this past spring, was on his way to class at the Minnesota State Community and Technical College campus in Fergus Falls. The economics class was taught by his mother, Angela Hartman, and he was usually 10 minutes early. When he didn't arrive, she began to worry.

Cadence was the older of the family's two boys. He was into musicals, Converse sneakers and sweets, and he had worked at Larry's Foods in Battle Lake for two years — the fifth generation of his family to work in a grocery store. He wanted to return home after studying technology at college (his nickname was "Tech Support") and had mentioned building a house near his parents. The younger son, Clayton, a Battle Lake eighth-grader, has a rare genetic disorder that means he will never be able to live independently. Their parents always took comfort from the expectation that after they died, Cadence would be around to keep an eye on his brother.

When he didn't show up for class, Angela messaged her husband, Jonathan Hartman, an art teacher at Underwood High School who had previously taught at Battle Lake. Their family phone plan allowed them to check the location of Cadence's phone and they saw that it had stopped suddenly near Wall Lake. Hartman asked a colleague, who was a first responder, if he knew of any accidents in the area. The teacher said there had been one near Wall Lake.

Things unfolded quickly after that. Jonathan learned that Cadence had been killed, and he got a ride to the college to tell his wife, summoning their pastor along the way who dropped everything to be with them.

Amid the shock and grief, they learned that Cadence would have died instantly. That comforted them. Their faith kicked in; they could visualize that Cadence's soul instantly transferred from Earth to heaven. They were able to summon empathy for the driver of the semi, who they believed had done everything he could to avoid the crash.

It was the second death for a member of the Battle Lake Class of 2024; four years earlier, one of Cadence's good friends, Dion Bush, died from a dog bite, and that had been hard on him, Angela said.

The next day, still numb, they learned of a second fatal crash. This one took the life of McKayla Schicker, 27, a mother of five young children and the owner of a donut shop in Battle Lake's newly opened Hatchery Row. They knew McKayla, who had been one of Jonathan's students when he taught at Battle Lake. McKayla's mother, Janet Schicker, had bought Cadence's and Clayton's old toys for her child care business.

Janet said Jonathan Hartman was McKayla's favorite teacher.

"And when I called her and told her about Cadence, she started to cry, and she said, 'Oh, my god, Mom, I feel so bad for Mr. Hartman.' Less than 24 hours later, she was dead, too," Schicker said.

McKayla was living in Fergus Falls, but she grew up in Battle Lake and her school-age children attend school there. She had learned donut making from her mom, who ran Bev's Bakery in Battle Lake, a business named after her own mother. McKayla opened Bev's Donut Shop in 2022 and found a niche delivering donuts made from scratch throughout the region. This fall, she had purchased a second bakery in Wadena and had just hired a baker.

"She finally had everything she wanted," Schicker said.

McKayla was driving to Battle Lake when she collided with a boom truck near Ottertail that was also driven by a Battle Lake graduate, Henry Gibbs, who was several years younger than McKayla. Janet Schicker said her understanding is that McKayla was trying to pass on Hwy. 78.

Like the Hartmans, she had been waiting for her daughter. The life of a single mom and business owner with five young children needs support from family and friends, and McKayla was going to deliver car seats to her mother so that Janet could drive to Wadena to fetch the youngest children, who were with a new babysitter. Janet didn't know where the children were, so she also needed directions from McKayla.

McKayla swapped child care with another single mom, and that's where Janet was waiting for her. They waited and waited. A notification of a wreck on 78 popped up on her social media account. She figured McKayla was stuck behind the crash. Janet had just talked to McKayla, so they expected her anytime. Time passed. Then her son called her to tell her that McKayla had been killed.

"My baby is gone!" Janet mourned on Facebook. "My heart is broken!"

Still bleary from shock, Janet had to try to track down McKayla's youngest children. The police tried, she said, visiting various child care places in Wadena without success. Finally they were able to track McKayla's path using Google Maps, and the county supplied the necessary car seats, and Janet was able to fetch the children.

McKayla had been a survivor of domestic violence, according to her mother and court records, and her family is trying to figure out how best to take care of the children without splitting them up. Janet is 65, lives in a small apartment, and runs the kitchen at the Fergus Falls hospital. McKayla's siblings are not in a situation where they can take five children. Janet has talked to her landlord about breaking her lease so that she can buy a house where she could raise the children, but she doesn't know if that is even possible.

Meanwhile, the community has set up accounts for each family at the local bank, and there's also an online fundraiser for McKayla's family.

This is the web of small-town life. Tragedies are keenly felt, and sometimes you know everybody involved. The deceased, their families, the person in the other vehicle, the first responders. Life goes on, of course. It always does. But for this generation, there will always be the absences, the "what ifs," and the sense that life is fragile.