Meredith Gaudreau is raising three kids under three. She still hears one night on a loop.
Nearly two years after her husband, Johnny Gaudreau, and his brother, Matthew, were struck and killed while cycling near their hometown in South Jersey, Meredith told People in an interview published this week that the night of August 29, 2024 “still feels like yesterday.” “It’s playing in my head all the time,” she said. “It haunts me.” The interview, timed just ahead of the second anniversary, is the most extensive she has spoken publicly about what the last two years have actually looked like: not a wound that closes on a schedule, but one she has learned to carry alongside a family that kept growing and a court case that still hasn’t reached a jury.
The Night That Still Doesn’t Feel Like the Past
Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau were killed on a road near Oldmans Township, New Jersey, the night before their sister Katie’s wedding, allegedly struck by a driver later identified as Sean Higgins. Meredith, who delivered a eulogy at their joint funeral days later, revealed then that she was roughly nine weeks pregnant with the couple’s third child. She was already raising daughter Noa and son Johnny Jr., not yet two and one years old.
Two years is not a milestone that resolves anything, and Meredith’s own account makes that plain. “I think about John 24/7,” she told People. “I think about him in that moment a lot, and think about the better moments too.” She credited her father, who she said has “pretty much retired to help me,” and her siblings, for getting her through the early months. What has changed, she said, is smaller than a recovery: “I’ve learned to be more present, don’t take anything for granted, and just sort of slow down and enjoy my time with my kids while they are so young.”
Quotes above are from Meredith Gaudreau's interview with People, published August 27, 2026.
The legal case has not moved as far as the grief has had time to settle. Higgins is charged with two counts each of reckless vehicular homicide, aggravated manslaughter, evidence tampering and leaving the scene of a fatal accident, and rejected a plea deal that would have carried a 35-year sentence. In May 2026, a New Jersey Superior Court judge denied a defense motion to dismiss the charges over how Higgins’s blood-alcohol evidence was presented to the grand jury, and the case remains pretrial, with no trial date publicly set. For Meredith, that means the anniversary this year lands with the same open legal question it did last year.
A Family That Kept Growing
The couple’s third child, Carter Michael Gaudreau, was born in April 2025, seven months after his father’s death. He carries Johnny’s middle name, and Meredith has noted he was born the same weight and length as his dad. “It can be chaos with three kids under three years old,” she said, “but when I see the three of them, I just always think John would be really loving this.”
That household is the throughline of the last two years, not a subplot to it. Meredith has said she spent her pregnancy with Carter focused narrowly on getting through it: “I wanted to make sure I was taking care of myself for my pregnancy. That was the most important thing to me.” The three children are, in her account, both the hardest part of the last two years and the clearest reason to keep getting through them.
The Hockey World Hasn’t Let Go Either
The tribute record around the Gaudreaus has been steady, not a one-time gesture. Meredith and Matthew’s widow, Madeline Gaudreau, publicly launched the John and Matthew Gaudreau Foundation on what would have been Johnny’s 32nd birthday, after forming it privately months earlier. On the one-year anniversary, the NHL and Columbus Blue Jackets each donated in the brothers’ jersey numbers, 13 and 21, and the Calgary Flames, where Johnny spent the first nine years of his career, gave the combined total to Mothers Against Drunk Driving Canada. Both teams have kept his memory visible beyond the paperwork: at the 2026 Winter Olympics, Team USA’s men’s hockey team held up Johnny’s jersey, kept in the locker room the whole tournament, for its gold-medal team photo, and brought Meredith’s two oldest kids onto the ice to sit in the middle of it.
None of that changes what Meredith described to People. The foundation, the donations, the gold-medal lap: they are the hockey world’s way of holding a loss that, for the person closest to it, has never actually receded. “It still feels like yesterday,” she said. Two years on, that is still the truest sentence anyone connected to this story has said out loud.