'I don't want to regret anything': Student whose sister died in New Zealand crash took charge of family matters while studying for A-Levels

SINGAPORE: On Monday, Apr 17, 2023, Jurong Pioneer Junior College student Shannon Chong was in class at 2.58pm, two minutes before the end of a mathematics tutorial, when she received a call from her mother. 

It was unusual for her mother, a housewife, to call during school hours. Since Shannon, then a J2 student, was still in class, she called her back when the tutorial ended minutes later. 

It ended up being the kind of call no one would ever want to receive. 

Shannon’s older sister had been killed in a road accident in New Zealand. Her mother relayed the news over the phone in disbelief, suspecting that it could be a scam.

Shannon herself wasn’t sure. The last time she saw her sister was on Valentine’s Day that year, when their family saw her off at the airport before her flight to New Zealand. 

“It was shocking. When I received the news of the car accident, I thought maybe car accidents are not that uncommon. But I just didn’t expect that it would be so fatal,” she told CNA on Friday (Feb 23). 

After telling her teachers about what had happened, she left school early and met her mother, who took a taxi down to collect her younger daughter. 

During the ride home, Shannon took it upon herself to confirm that the accident was real and called the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) officer who had relayed the news to her mother. 

“The way he explained was very detailed, so it was very real. He could also tell me some personal information about my sister, so I started to believe it. It started to sink in with me, that this is real,” Shannon, now 18, told CNA. 

Her mother chose not to immediately inform her father, and instead waited for him to come home that night. “He’s a taxi driver ... she was scared that if she broke the news to him over the phone, it would be dangerous,” Shannon added. 

“I think it was hard on my mum, she had to worry about her grief for my sister, and she also had to think about how to break the news to my dad.” 

Her older sister Sherwin, who was 21 at the time of the accident, was in a campervan with two friends when it collided with a barrier and caught fire just after 1am on Apr 17, 2023 on New Zealand’s South Island. All three of them were killed in the accident. 

Sherwin and her two friends were undergraduates at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She was a second-year business administration student on an exchange programme with the University of Otago in New Zealand. 

MISSING SCHOOL TO HANDLE FAMILY MATTERS

The next thing Shannon remembers was many people contacting her family to offer their assistance and support. Since her parents were not as tech-savvy, she took over as the main point of contact with the authorities to settle administrative matters and bring her sister home. 

“At that point in time, I just felt very busy. I think that distracted me from confronting my own grief and emotions,” Shannon shared, remembering the many calls and emails she had to reply to. 

Settling her sister’s matters was not a straightforward process, and as a J2 student with the A-Levels looming, Shannon also had her studies to think about. 

“At first I was very reluctant to skip school. But I realised that I have a lot of emails and people who were trying to find me,” she added. 

She ended up taking more than three weeks off to help identify her sister’s body, fly to New Zealand to collect her remains and organise her funeral back in Singapore. 

Before the family could travel, the body had to first be identified. Her sister’s body “wasn’t in very good condition” because of the accident, and the authorities needed more information. 

In the worst-case scenario, the family would have had to fly over with Sherwin’s toothbrush to finish the DNA tests, but this would have meant a longer trip and more time away from school. 

Eager to soothe her parents’ anxiety, Shannon asked what they could do from Singapore to speed up the process. International SOS, who worked with the families of the three victims, suggested looking for dental records and X-rays of her teeth. 

Knowing that her sister had gone for dental treatments in the past, Shannon called multiple clinics across Singapore looking for her records, but none of them had anything useful. 

But then she remembered that her sister had a friend who was a dentistry student, and she had approached him for help with her teeth before. Shannon tracked down the friend on Instagram and asked him whether he might have any records. 

The friend said they did take an X-ray of her teeth at the time, and gave her the phone number of the dental clinic. But they did not have the records either. 

But her sister’s friend clearly remembered her taking a photo of the X-ray. “So I knew I had to get into her iCloud library,” Shannon said. 

After many tries, Shannon managed to guess her sister’s iCloud password and gained access to all of her photos and videos – they were close enough to know some of each other’s passwords. But looking for the photo of the X-ray was like looking for a needle in a haystack. 

Her mother recalled that the dental clinic was located in Bukit Timah, so Shannon used the location tags on her sister’s photos and eventually found it.

Almost a week after they got the news, Shannon and her parents flew to New Zealand. They stayed for one-and-a-half weeks and decided to cremate Sherwin there. They returned home with her ashes and her relatives helped with funeral arrangements. 

For the three weeks she was away, Shannon’s classmates helped her collect notes and homework while her teachers regularly checked in and offered Zoom lessons whenever she was ready to catch up with her work. 

They also attended Sherwin’s funeral. “It was nice to see my teachers and my friends come. It was really nice to see them comfort my parents, because I couldn’t do the emotional comforting part,” she added, choking up and pausing to collect herself. 

“It was nice to know that someone was there to help me with that.” 

RETURNING TO SCHOOL AND CATCHING UP

A few days after the funeral, Shannon returned to school. Her teachers gave her extra consultation slots and her friends passed along the notes they took for her, complete with little tips and hacks that were shared in class. 

“It was very comforting to see that everything and everyone was still the same. Nothing much changed,” Shannon told CNA. She also used the June holidays to catch up with her work, going through recorded lectures and finishing tutorials she had missed. 

Shannon was “pretty self-motivated” after coming back to school, said Ms Ang Shu Zhen, 35, one of her form teachers. 

“She just picked herself up and said okay, I’m going to start, and I’m going to aim to clear topic by topic, whatever I missed,” she added. 

Shannon also sought out her tutors proactively to ask them about what she missed out on, said Ms Ang. “In general, she knew what needed to be done. She’s mature and she came back and did most of the work herself.” 

Coming back to school unintentionally served as a distraction from grief, Shannon said, adding that she had only talked about her sister’s accident at length in preparation for Friday's interviews with the media, which has helped her process her emotions a bit more. 

Her friends also checked in on her after her return. “But because I didn’t even process my own feelings yet, so I didn’t really have a proper reply to give them other than ‘I’m okay’,” Shannon said, adding that she still finds it difficult to talk about the accident. 

Things at home are as per usual. “I think my mum always says this: Life goes on. I think she’s very strong,” said the 18-year-old. 

Her sister’s accident also gave her some new perspective, prompting her to work even harder for her A-Levels. She collected her results on Friday, and scored Bs for H2 Computing and H1 Economics. 

She aims to study computer science at university and hopes to get into her ideal course at Nanyang Technological University. 

“The main thing that I realised is that death is very close to us. I think that really made me more motivated to live life to the fullest. I don’t want to regret anything,” she added. 

“And (I learned) to cherish whatever I have now. Because you never know, you can just suddenly get into an accident and pass away.” 

Growing up, Shannon and her sister were close, but they drifted apart a bit as they grew older and went to different schools with different circles of friends. 

Many of her preferences, like her taste in music, are inherited from her sister, Shannon said, recalling when the two would learn K-pop dances together in front of a big mirror in the living room at home. “Because she’s four years older than me, so it’s like she goes through life before me.” 

One of her favourite memories with her sister is when the latter would come to her for advice. “We would sit on her bed, and she would tell me her problems. And she would ask me, is it her fault or is it her friend’s fault, how I would advise her,” she said. 

“I think it was really nice that she didn’t think of me as a clueless little sister.” 

Since her sister had been overseas for a few months before the accident took place, Shannon felt a bit distant from her and had not interacted with her as much as she usually would have. 

Tearing up again, she said: “So even until after the accident, it still feels like that. She’s still in New Zealand.”