The father of a 15-year-old boy who drowned on a school trip to Algonquin Park earlier this month says he’s still struggling to come to grips with the fact his boy is gone.
“This is a dream,” Jeremiah Perry’s father, Joshua Anderson, told CTV News Toronto at a visitation for his son on Saturday afternoon. “Jerry’s going to come back one day.”
He said he and his wife keep the light on in Jeremiah’s room each night when they go to sleep.
“The word closure,” Anderson said. “There’s no such thing and I don’t think there will ever be.”
On Saturday, relatives, classmates, school officials gathered to remember Jeremiah, an energetic boy who his Anderson said expressed an interest in becoming a comedian.
“Jerry makes everybody laugh, that’s why he told me he wanted to be a comedian,” Anderson said.
Jeremiah, a student at C.W. Jeffreys Collegiate, went missing while on a school canoe and camping trip on a remote lake inside Algonquin Park on the night of July 4. His body was found the next day.
Since his drowning, Perry’s family has questioned why he was let in the water without a life jacket on, despite the fact that there were six supervisors along with the children on the trip.
The Toronto District School Board says it is cooperating fully with an OPP investigation into the drowning and said both Jeremiah and his brother, who also went on the trip, were given swimming proficiency tests.
The family says the anxiously await the results of the police investigation.
A Go Fund Me page was set up earlier this to support the Andersons as they prepare for Jeremiah’s burial and to honour him.
Jeremiah will be buried after a service on Monday.
