Church community in shock after leader dies in Alberta bus rollover: pastor
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A pastor says loved ones are at a loss for words after a church leader died when a charter bus rolled on a northern Alberta highway, ejecting children and adults returning home from a Bible competition.
“(Lillian Banda) made the world a better place,” Dan Wilson, with the Grande Prairie Seventh-day Adventist Church, said in a phone interview Monday.
“She’s just one of those people that will do whatever needs to be done with a smile on her face. Anyone who knows Lillian is devastated.
“No one ever thinks this is gonna happen, right?”
Wilson said Banda had chaperoned multiple youths attending the competition in Edmonton, and on Saturday night she and 36 other church members were on the bus heading home to Grande Prairie, including Banda’s husband and two youngest children.
The bus crashed into a median near Debolt, about 60 kilometres east of Grande Prairie.
Some passengers, including children as young as six years old, landed about 50 metres from where the bus stopped rolling, Wilson said.
Wilson said shock, pain, the cold temperature and the darkness on the remote highway made it difficult at first for passengers to call for help.
It was a youth who was eventually able to find a phone and call police, he said.
Banda, a 50-year-old nurse, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Wilson said five adults and a six-year-old boy were taken to hospital in serious condition.
Three of the adults have since been discharged, and two of them are awaiting surgery — one for a broken collar bone and the other for a broken shoulder.
One woman remains in hospital with two cracked vertebrae, five broken ribs and a broken wrist, Wilson added.
He said she’s a new immigrant from Jamaica. Her two daughters, who were not injured, are now staying with Wilson and his wife. Their father was discharged from hospital with the broken shoulder.
Mounties said Monday they had no updates in the crash investigation.
Wilson said the children on the bus are part of the church’s Pathfinder group, and they often make the journey back and forth from Edmonton and Grand Prairie, as they share churches in both cities.
“Pathfinders is similar to like Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts. So they do activities like camping, raise money for blankets for the homeless, all kinds of stuff,” he said.
An upcoming trip in March is in limbo, he said. “We’ll see how parents are feeling and how things go.”
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said she was deeply saddened to hear about the crash.
“My heart is with the family who lost a loved one, with those recovering from their injuries, and with the congregation walking through this painful time together,” Smith said in an online post.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 9, 2026.