BATTLE LAKE, Minn. - The signs are there if you know where to look. Two bouquets of flowers lying just outside the door of Bev’s Donut Shop in the falling snow. The announcement, affixed to the glass doors of Larry’s Foods, that the grocery store would close for several hours on Saturday to allow staff time to attend a funeral.
This city of less than a thousand people in Otter Tail County is reeling from the loss of two of its young people in separate car crashes a day apart.
Last Thursday, Cadence Hartman, 18, who graduated from Battle Lake High School this past spring, was on his way to class at the Minnesota State Community and Technical College campus in Fergus Falls. The economics class was taught by his mother, Angela Hartman, and he was usually 10 minutes early. When he didn’t arrive, she began to worry.
Cadence was the older of the family’s two boys. He was into musicals, Converse sneakers and sweets, and he had worked at Larry’s Foods in Battle Lake for two years — the fifth generation of his family to work in a grocery store. He wanted to return home after studying technology at college (his nickname was “Tech Support”) and had mentioned building a house near his parents. The younger son, Clayton, a Battle Lake eighth-grader, has a rare genetic disorder that means he will never be able to live independently. Their parents always took comfort from the expectation that after they died, Cadence would be around to keep an eye on his brother.
When he didn’t show up for class, Angela messaged her husband, Jonathan Hartman, an art teacher at Underwood High School who had previously taught at Battle Lake. Their family phone plan allowed them to check the location of Cadence’s phone and they saw that it had stopped suddenly near Wall Lake. Hartman asked a colleague, who was a first responder, if he knew of any accidents in the area. The teacher said there had been one near Wall Lake.
Things unfolded quickly after that. Jonathan learned that Cadence had been killed, and he got a ride to the college to tell his wife, summoning their pastor along the way who dropped everything to be with them.
Amid the shock and grief, they learned that Cadence would have died instantly. That comforted them. Their faith kicked in; they could visualize that Cadence’s soul instantly transferred from Earth to heaven. They were able to summon empathy for the driver of the semi, who they believed had done everything he could to avoid the crash.
It was the second death for a member of the Battle Lake Class of 2024; four years earlier, one of Cadence’s good friends, Dion Bush, died from a dog bite, and that had been hard on him, Angela said.