Image: Katie Dirks / Gavin Dirks crouches next wind chimes in his backyard where he buried his beloved cat Sader, who was crushed by a motor vehicle on Portage Avenue near Little Mountain in May, and later died. 

By Mike Vanden Bosch

Family mourns

Chilliwack family mourns beloved cat who was sadly crushed by a speeding car – and hopes drivers can slow down

Jun 6, 2025 | 9:38 AM

CHILLIWACK — No matter the amount of time they spend with us, whether it’s one year or 15 years, pets find a way into our hearts and leave a lasting impact.

For Katie Dirks and her son Gavin, their paths intersected in September 2024 with a little cat named Sader – and there was no turning back.

“We met Sader in September of 2024, at the Yarrow sports field. He was a little baby, and his sister was with him,” Katie said. “My eldest daughter plays rugby with the Chilliwack Crusaders. While we sat and watched practice, Sader fell in love with Gavin. He was very friendly with everyone but climbed right into my van… and laid down.”

Gavin and Sader spent hours playing from the first day they met.

Image: Contributed / Sader the cat with Gavin.

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“I got a call from the school once. Sader spent most of the day here with Gavin. Bugger would follow Gavin to school and cry outside the window [of his school]. All my neighbours had Sader along for a a car ride or a snooze or play in their house. Someone also claimed Sader was theirs and took him. We ended up finding him at their home all the way in Fairfield island. He lived a very colourful life.”

Image: Contributed / Sader inside a car. Sader lived a colourful life, according to Katie Dirks.

Roughly two weeks ago on Thursday evening, May 22, tragedy struck when a grey SUV driving on Portage Avenue near Little Mountain Elementary ran over Sader – in front of Gavin – sending the cat into immediate trauma.

“The traumatic part is my kids holding Sader down so he didn’t keep flipping, and then me picking him up carrying him aimlessly while begging my neighbour to take me to a vet,” Katie said. “He was still breathing when I picked him up, and my kids were all screaming at me to do something… so my only thought was to at least attempt to get him medical help,” Katie said.

Sader had a tendency to hang around the side of the road near or on the storm drain and bat stuff into the drain, so that he could watch it in the water. That’s why he was on the side of the road the day of the fateful crash.

Katie believes the driver who ran over Sader was careless.

“YOU WERE SPEEDING down a RESIDENTIAL STREET where children play! Where old people walk! Where people walk their dogs!” Katie wrote on Facebook the night of the incident.

She later told Fraser Valley Today, “The driver is in the middle of the road, swerves towards the sidewalk/drain, hits him, drives off on the wrong side of the road. There’s no way they couldn’t see him laying there though… so that’s my issue. The loud noise is the impact. Like, how do you not know that you just hit something?”

Katie and her family did what they could to domesticate him, but Sader was ultimately an outdoor cat. They sensed that he was decimated when he was confined to the house itself.

“We were trying to train him into staying in or close by. He was miserable when we kept him locked in. He hated the litter box,” she said. “We tried a catio sort of situation and he escaped. So at that point we decided that it was against his nature.”

Gavin buried Sader in the family’s backyard, picking cat nip and a wind chime – because Sader liked batting at them.

Through Sader’s passing, Katie hopes to enlist the help of Mayor Ken Popove and the City of Chilliwack into implementing traffic-calming measures on her street. She says the area of Portage Avenue is inside a school zone perimeter.

“Our goal ultimately is to push our city/mayor into more help for our street,” Katie said. “The amount of disrespectful drivers has become overwhelming. My son has almost been hit numerous times while on the sidewalk, in the same place our Sader was killed. We are just fed up with it and want some respect. I’d like people to have empathy. Ultimately our expectation is that the city puts in speed bumps and actually comes and monitors at random times how people disrespect this neighborhood.”