Leah Altizer found the perfect 15th wedding anniversary card for her tennis-buff husband Matt.
The plain white card featured a pair of crossed racquets with the words Perfect Match. Inside the card reads -- Advantage: Me -- and Leah signed it -- "Happy Anniversary to my partner for life."
They lived happily married for 16 years in a loving family with their son Jonathan, 14, and daughter Emily, 12, until their lives ended tragically Thursday morning in a terrible highway accident that also took the life of Matt's 47-year-old sister Heather Kress.
The sport utility vehicle Matt Altizer was driving crossed the centre line and collided head-on with a transport truck on Highway 97 north of McLeese Lake. All five occupants of the vehicle are believed to have died instantly. The family was travelling to Vancouver to watch the Davis Cup professional tennis matches which started Friday.
Leah, 35, loved being a parent, as did Matt, and their lives revolved around their kids. They were planning a family trip to Mexico in April to celebrate their 16th anniversary and had the kids' passport photos taken earlier this week.
"Those kids meant the world to her, she thought of everyone else instead of herself," said Brandy Radford, Leah's cousin and best friend.
Leah grew up in Fort St. James with her Roberts siblings, Brian, Keith, Teresa and Richard, and it was Keith who introduced her to Matt. Leah worked for 18 years as a sales clerk at Zellers, where her loss is being felt by her 100 co-workers at the store.
"What a wonderful person she was," said Jessica Smith, store manager and longtime friend. "Her laugh was contagious. She was very much liked by everyone. She was a lovely, jolly person who had many friends here."
Just before the Altizers left for Vancouver, one of the employees there switched lunchhour time slots so Leah could go for lunch with her mom before she left on the trip.
Daughter Emily was an honor roll student in Grade 7 at Westwood elementary school, where she developed her artistic talents, having been introduced to knitting by her grandmother, Hilda Altizer, Matt's mother. Emily inherited her father's athletic genes and loved volleyball and basketball.
"She was a little artist with beautiful handwriting who loved anything crafty and made gorgeous pictures," said Radford.
"She loved doing girly stuff, shopping, doing nails," said Emily's cousin Chantal Hogben. "It's unbelievable she's gone, she's so young."
Jonathan, who attended Grade 9 classes at Prince George secondary school, was big into skateboarding and shared his dad's passion for playing pool on the family's basement table. He spent hours practicing at the Rotary skateboard park, was an avid mountain biker and looked forward to joining Matt and Emily for days on the slopes snowboarding.
Both kids loved music and drew their inspiration from Matt, who learned piano at an early age and had an in-house studio. Karaoke was a popular family pasttime.
"He played piano beautifully and sang beautifully too, he was very talented," said Radford. "Jon played guitar and Matt was teaching Emily the piano."
Matt earned the reputation among his family of being a perfectionist at whatever he did. He designed mechanized Lego projects he made the plans available online to allow people who bought the design to build robotic toy excavators and bulldozers. He also built his own electric turbocharger, which he installed in his Honda Prelude.
Matt, 40, was a 16-year employee of The Prince George Citizen, where he worked as systems manager. As much as possible he kept his family life separate from his work. But when the Citizen computers went down, even while on holidays on remote Haida Gwaii, where Leah's parents Lil and Ben Roberts lived, he didn't mind getting on his cell phone to offer his help.
"I know for the Citizen he had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility," said Matt's oldest brother Gene.
"He'd put himself on the line as late of hours as he could to do what he had to do to get the job done. He just couldn't leave it undone, he stressed about it and I used to ask him, do you really have that many problems?
"He said, "I make my own problems. When everything is going smoothly I think I can make it run better and then I add something that creates a whole new set of problems I end up fighting with for the next month or two. And when everything gets running smoothly again, I think I can make it even better."
