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Murder victim had a big heart |
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Written by Sherri Gallant and Dave Mabell
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Monday, June 29 2009, 10:42 PM |
Lyle Scott Madge was a man who grabbed life by the lapels and kissed it full on the mouth.
His mother, Jill Capewell, of Shaughnessy, told The Herald Monday her eldest child was a rambunctious boy who “liked to drive fast,” and whose heart was as big as his attitude. He died early Saturday after being stabbed during an altercation in Magrath in which another man was injured. Two 18-year-olds from Magrath have been charged and an RCMP investigation continues.
Madge was living with his girlfriend, Lyndsy, in Magrath, where he’d moved after living in Vancouver for a few years. He is the father of two children, Kayley, 3, of Vancouver, and Nic, age 8, who lives in Edmonton.
“He was bratty as a kid but everybody loved him,” said Capewell. “He liked to drive fast and he liked to do a lot of burnouts — that’s why they did burnouts at the vigil (Monday) night.”
About 200 friends and family members gathered for a candlelight vigil at Henderson Lake Park Sunday evening. A memorial service has been planned in B.C. for his Vancouver friends, but funeral arrangements in Lethbridge are still in the planning stages.
Meanwhile, Capewell said she will remember her eldest child as a boy who kept the rest of the family on its toes, a boy with a “crazy” sense of humour, a kid who was so smart he could read and write when he was four years old, but whose ADHD gave him a racing brain that balked at having to focus in school.
“There was one time when we were sitting at the table and the kids wouldn’t quit talking, so I told them to be quiet and eat,” she recalled. “And Lyle started talking with his hands. And I yelled at him, ‘if you can’t talk, will you just shut up?’ - well, he never let me live that down. In fact none of them have ever let me live that down.”
He was the oIdest of three, with a brother, Keith, and a sister, Tanya. He was born in Calgary and moved to Lethbridge when he was four, growing up in the London Road neighbourhood.
In 1995, when the Oldman River flooded in Lethbridge, Madge was helping crews fill sandbags when he bumped into then mayor David Carpenter. He told Carpenter how the London Road area kids had worked hard to come together and get along with each other, since they’d come from such diverse cultural backgrounds. Enough progress had been made that the kids were all playing baseball together in the community’s park, when along came city parks crews to plant a grove of trees.
“When they planted these trees, they couldn’t play baseball anymore,” Capewell said. “. . .Mayor Carpenter arranged to have the trees moved so that the kids could still play baseball at the park.”
Madge was devastated by the death of his birth father, Randy Madge, last September and had been deeply affected when his newborn baby sister died, in 1992.
He worked in construction and had been a bouncer at nightclubs here and on the West Coast.
Meanwhile, RCMP are still awaiting the results of an autopsy being conducted in Calgary on the 31-year-old.
Police say they were successful in obtaining a number of eyewitness accounts of the altercation, which occurred on a quiet Magrath street. Four people were involved in the confrontation, said RCMP spokesman Sgt. Patrick Webb.
A murder charge was subsequently laid against Addison Wakefield, along with an assault with a weapon charge against Kristian Ramberg. Wakefield is in custody while awaiting his next court appearance Friday. Ramberg was released after a bail hearing and is expected to answer to the assault charge July 8.
Mayor James Murphy was not available Monday for comment on how the murder might impact the community, where the last such incident dated back to the early 1970s. A more recent incident, involving the 2002 death of a 52-year-old man after a fight on Christmas day, was deemed an accident and no charges were laid.
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