Friends of Tim McLean are reeling after finding out he was the 22-year-old murdered on a Greyhound bus outside Portage la Prairie.
"He was just an all around awesome friend," Colleen Yestrau told CTV News. "He'd give you the shirt off his back if he could."
Yestrau and her boyfriend Eric McKinnon lived with McLean.
"He's the best friend I ever had," McKinnon said. "I've known him since grade one. I was six and he was five."
Derek Caron spoke to McLean about an hour before he was killed. He was supposed to pick his friend up from the bus depot. He waited for more than four hours, but McLean never arrived.
Mclean was on his way back from Edmonton, where he had been working at a carnival for the summer. He had been doing the same job for the last three years.
"I got a phone call from a guy who talked to a guy and he told me [what happened]," Caron said. "But I had to see it for myself. I waited there. He never got off the bus."
Dereks' brother William Caron and Tim McLean were also friends. They got their first tattoos together and have been friends since the seventh grade.
"Maybe those passengers they'll forget one day, but for his friends and family this is one of the most tragic moments of our lives," he said.
Tim McLean's friends are angry. Angry someone was able to get a knife onto the Greyhound bus, and angry no one tried to stop the attack.
But mostly they're angry they'll never get to see their friend again.
His friends say they'd like to go to the site where it all happened, and plant crosses in the ground.
