When Leif Rohlin walked into the locker room for a Saturday training session, the police were there. They told him that his friend and former team-mate had been killed in the street, not far from where he lived.
Rohlin, who had won Olympic ice hockey gold with Sweden the year before and would later play in the NHL, says he can’t remember the exact words officers used on that March morning in 1995.
He can’t remember whether it was there in the locker room that he learned just how brutal the killing had been, that his friend had been stabbed 64 times.
He can’t remember where he was when he first heard that it was a man with ties to a neo-Nazi group who had been arrested, or that police suspected his friend had been killed after making a pass at the man.
What Rohlin does remember is that training got pushed back an hour.
Vasteras had a decisive play-off game the following day. He remembers that there was a minute of silence…