In the winter of 1997, Bob McIntosh was a successful lawyer living in Squamish, B.C. with his wife, Katy, and their four-year-old twins, Sam and Emma.

He was an avid runner and cyclist who raced in the world's elite triathlons. He loved to ski and dance. He was known as one of the cool guys by the young people in his neighbourhood.

On New Year's Eve of that year, he and Katy did what they always did on the last day of the year: they had a couple of friends over for dinner; by 10 p.m. they had tucked the kids into bed and were enjoying a drink and visit with their guests. Another couple arrived at around 10:30 p.m., friends from the neighbourhood.

"It looks like Jamie's having a party," one of them said as they came into the house, shaking the snow off their shoes.

Jamie's dad and new stepmom were Katy's and Bob's closest friends. They were away on their honeymoon and had left their teenaged son to his own devices over the latter part of the Christmas holidays.

Bob and Katy were good friends and good neighbours and saw it as their responsibility to make sure everything was all right at the house down the street.

Parties in Squamish can get out of hand, they knew. One person invites 10 people, and each of them invite another 10 and soon you have a housewrecker on your hands.

"I should call and make sure everything's all right," Bob said, going to the phone.

The person who picked up wasn't Jamie, but he said he'd look for him. After a moment's silence, he returned to say he couldn't find the host and hung up.

Bob called again. Someone different picked up this time, Bob could hear the sounds of a thumping party in the background. Still no Jamie.

"I'm going over there," Bob told his wife and guests, "just to see that everything is OK."

The three men shrugged on their coats. Each grabbed a beer, it was New Year's after all, and they wanted to blend in with the young revellers.

When they arrived at Jamie's, they found a house packed with people, more than 200 police later said, and a party that by 10:30 was already out of control.

The three split up, one went to the kitchen where he struck up a conversation with some people he knew through his own teenaged children. The other didn't know the house, and got lost in the melee. Bob went upstairs to his friends' master bedroom, to make sure no one was invading their space.

"But the problem was," Katy recounted Tuesday in Whitehorse, "every space in the house had been invaded. Most of the people at the party didn't even know the family and they had no respect for anything or place in the house."

In the master bedroom, Bob encountered two young men, both tall and beefy, both named Ryan, both drunk, and both angry when they heard what Bob had to say.

"Party's over, guys. Time to break it up."

Bob and one of the two young men exchanged some words, no one remembers what was said anymore. What the first Ryan does remember is that he punched Bob in the side of the head, and he fell to the ground.

The second Ryan, Katy says, "was angry. He was angry that Bob was there to break up the party. He was angry that someone was there telling him what to do."

So he kicked Bob.

He later described it as "four soccer-style kicks to his head."

Bob didn't move.

The two Ryans picked up their drinks, went downstairs and continued to party. Everyone else in the room did the same.

They didn't check to see if Bob was OK. They didn't call an ambulance. They simply went back to their New Year's Eve celebration.

Bob's friend, the one who had gotten lost in the big house, found him. He was the one who called 911 and rode with Bob to the hospital.

When Katy arrived at emergency, she was met by the doctor on duty. He was a friend of hers, Squamish isn't a very big place remember. He was standing in the door of the emergency room, still holding the defibrillator paddles in his hands, the ones he had used to jump-start Bob's heart.

He had tears streaming down his face.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "Bob's gone."

One of the kicks had severed an artery in Bob's head and he died of a brain hemorrhage.

Katy Hutchison has told this story hundreds of times to hundreds of thousands of people.

She tells it with dry eyes and a firm voice, although the people hearing it often cry, and their voices are sometimes shaky when they ask her questions about how and why she does what she does.

Since her husband's violent death, Katy has made it her mission to educate young people and their parents about how alcohol and other drugs, peer pressure, bad choices and an unchaperoned setting combined to set the stage for her husband's tragic death.

Today she is a powerful advocate for restorative justice, a process where offender and victim come together to face the repercussions of a crime, and hopefully, recover from the trauma it has caused.

"Anger is such a wasteful emotion," Katy says. "It is so unproductive, and it has so much potential for harm."

Katy probably wouldn't be blamed for harbouring some resentment toward the men who attacked her husband, or the other people who were in the house that night - many of them neighbours, kids that Bob had known well enough to stop and talk to in the street.

No one who was at the party said anything. No one came forward with any information about what happened that night. No one would talk to the police. No one came to Katy to offer condolences.

For 2 1/2 years, police tried to find someone who would talk to them, to no avail. So they went undercover, and spent another 2 1/2 years secretively gathering evidence.

Finally, in 2003, they broke the case. Ryan Aldridge, the man who had delivered the blows which ended Bob's life, was arrested at work and put into a holding cell.

Katy was flown by helicopter to meet him. They sat together in a small windowless interrogation room, both of them overwhelmed: she by a confusing mixture of grief and sympathy, he by the years of guilt and self-loathing he could finally admit.

"As strange as it sounds," she says now, "what I really wanted to do was walk over to him and put my hand on his shoulder, to comfort him."

Katy convinced Aldridge to make a full confession and to plead guilty to manslaughter.

He was sentenced to five years in a medium security prison.

She had no stomach for a trial, she says, and the lawyer of the other man who had thrown the punch knew that. He got his client off with a simple assault charge.

Instead of putting him in jail, the judge gave him a conditional sentence: He was not to drink or use drugs, he could not carry or own any weapons ("Ironic," Katy says, "seeing as his fist was his weapon"), and he must participate in a restorative justice process.

"To be honest," Katy says, "I don't agree with that being imposed. In order for restorative justice to work, the person has to want to do it. He did not.

"But," she says of the man who threw the punch, "he eventually came around. In the end I think it was the best way."

In the years between Bob's death and Ryan's arrest, Katy began speaking about her experience. She wanted to teach parents about the danger of leaving young people unattended, of giving them too much responsibility and allowing them to get themselves into volatile situations.

She spoke to elementary and secondary school students about making healthy decisions, about fighting peer pressure and about looking out for people who aren't doing those things.

"I talk to kids about synergy," she says. "Positive synergy is what you get on a sports team. It's what happens when you brainstorm ideas.

"Negative synergy is what happened at that party. It's that mob mentality. It's what prevented everyone at that party from talking to police."

Now that she has been through the restorative justice process, she speaks about that too.

It is, in her view, the best way for victims of a crime to recover from the ensuing trauma. And especially for people like Ryan, she says, it ends the cycle of anger, violence and crime that incarceration only exacerbates.

"When Ryan went into jail, I was told he would have a 50 per cent chance of coming out a heroine addict with Hepatitis," Katy says. "I didn't see how that would help anyone."

For Ryan, his first taste of prison still haunts him today.

"I heard this horrible scream; it is a sound I'll never forget," he recalls in a short film made for Katy's presentation. "Next thing I knew we were all being moved back to our cells, where we stayed for three days on lock down."

He later learned that one inmate had walked into another's cell with a cupful of gasoline. He threw it is the man's face and then lit him on fire before closing the cell door.

It was retribution for a $30 tobacco debt.

But Katy didn't leave him to the hungry maw of crime university. She visited him, she talked to him, they sat in silence, they cried, he told her about all the anger that had built up in him over his life. He apologized. She offered him a job.

Ryan is out of prison now. He often accompanies Katy on her speaking tours, although while Katy is in Whitehorse this week, Ryan is at home.

"He has a job. He is in a healthy relationship. He is clean and sober," Katy says. "I'm proud of him."

"It never goes away," she says when a student from Porter Creek Secondary School, where she spoke Tuesday evening, asks how she has gotten over the pain of losing her husband.

"It becomes a part of you, but you can't let it take over."