Jessica Caron had a smile that could light up a room, says Tami Harms, who was her friend for more than three decades.
Jessica Caron had a smile that could light up a room, says Tami Harms, who was her friend for more than three decades.
Harms was about 11, both of them in Grade 6, when she met Jessica — who was called Jessica Applegate back then. They almost instantly became friends and were part of a tight-knit group of four girls.
Jessica had an amazing personality and helped care for her brother, who had a disability, Harms recalls. It inspired her to want to help people with disabilities.
“She was a good girl just shown down a wrong path and couldn’t find her way back, until recently,” Harms said.
Near the end of Jessica’s life, she started giving back to the community — as her son, 22-year-old Brandon Applegate, had been doing before he was taken in an act of violence in 2020, she added.
The next day, police charged her husband, Derek Thomas Caron, 43, with second-degree murder and Crystal Rose Lafond, 37, with accessory after the fact to murder.
As a 20-year-old, Derek Caron was sentenced to seven years in prison for criminal negligence after causing the deaths of a couple from Rosetown, Trevor and Verne Nordholm, in a high-speed collision while leading Saskatoon police on a chase through the city’s downtown core in a stolen car on Feb. 14, 1999.
Harms said Jessica’s family feels anger, hurt and frustration, wondering why she was killed — the same question they asked after Brandon’s death.
It’s important for the community to know that a last name doesn’t define someone as a person, she said.
She said Jessica was “kept away” from family and friends for the last couple of years, and had been planning to leave the situation. When she ran into her, she could tell her friend had been bettering her life, but there was still trauma, she said.
She noticed her friend started to change sometime around the summer of 1993, when high school was about to start, Harms said. Jessica had started to hang out with a different group of people who were into alcohol and drugs.
“We could bring her back sometimes, but when the drugs get ahold of you, you become a different person.”
Brandon was her second eldest child; eight of her children survive her.
Their cousin, Starla Sippola, whose brother Tyler Applegate was killed in 2017, said Jessica was loved and kind.
“Murder in Saskatchewan has become so acceptable that the law allows people to repeat their behaviour without fear. Having the people you love violently taken changes your (per)spective on life. Jessica had children that she should have seen grow. She had people who depended on her,” Sippola wrote in a message to the StarPhoenix.
The trio of women who were friends with Jessica as children have permission to put up a cross at the site where her remains were found. They plan to celebrate her birthday every year, to talk about and remember her, and to release balloons on her birthday and on the anniversary of her death, Harms said.
“Just remember her in the light we remember her in, not in the tragedy of what has happened.”
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