Vancouver (BC), Canada – In an odd legal twist, the widow of a heli-skier who died in a tree well has filed a lawsuit against the deceased’s assigned “ski buddy.”

Mark Frank Kennedy, a trial attorney from Colorado, had signed a liability waiver and was skiing with Mike Wiegele Helicopter Skiing in the mountains north of Revelstoke in southeastern B.C. when he suffocated and died in a tree well — a deep hole in the snow created by the boughs of a conifer tree — in January 2009. Earier in the day, Wiegele guides had paired Kennedy with a British tourist, Adrian Coe, to serve as “ski buddies” to look out for one another’s welfare.

Kennedy’s widow, Elizabeth Kennedy, alleges that Coe failed in those duties, and filed a lawsuit against him in B.C. Supreme Court in 2011. That case is currently at trial in Vancouver.

The court this week heard Coe’s defense that although the buddy system was established for skiing in forested areas, the incident in question occurred at the bottom of the “Norbert’s Nose” run in a logged area known as the “Cut Block,” where just the tips of the trees were visible above the surface of the snow. Coe further contends that he alerted guides once he noticed that Kennedy did not arrive with the rest of the group at the helicopter waiting at the bottom of the Cut Block.

The trial is expected to continue through next week.