ENFIELD — Sandy Lea was on her way to work one February morning in 2011 and was about to enter Lebanon on Route 4.

Her husband, Richard Rouleau, had left their Enfield home a few minutes earlier, taking much the same route. The self-employed plumber and electrician was headed for a job that Thursday at the home of his wife's boss.

As Lea neared the intersection of routes 4 and 4A near the bridge over the Mascoma River, she encountered a traffic jam. There obviously was a problem on the highway, and police diverted her and the other drivers headed that way onto a side street at around 8 a.m.

Her husband never made it past the intersection that morning.

“I never saw his van, which I guess was a good thing,” Lea said Friday.

As Manchester native Rouleau, 59, made his way west on Route 4, he suddenly encountered an empty, moving logging trailer in his lane, headed straight at him. He apparently had no time to avoid the collision, according to authorities. Rouleau's van rolled after impact with the empty trailer, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.

Sixteen months after the crash, a Grafton County Superior Court grand jury in North Haverhill has indicted a Newbury, Vt., man, Brewster Thurston, now 53, on a charge of negligent homicide.

Thurston was headed in the opposite direction from Rouleau that morning in Lebanon when his life and those of Rouleau and Lea all took a sudden and tragic turn.

According to the indictment, the grand jurors found that Thurston “failed to properly secure a log trailer to a 1996 Western Star truck he was operating,” causing it to come loose, triggering the events that caused “fatal injuries to Richard Rouleau.”

The Class B felony is punishable by 3 1/2 to 7 years in prison. A message left Sunday on Thurston's home was not returned. Norwich, Vt., attorney George Ostler recently became Thurston's defense lawyer, but declined last week to comment on the case.

When Lea, now 53, couldn't reach her husband by phone after an hour on that morning last year, she called police, but couldn't find out who had been in the crash.

“They wouldn't say,” she said.

That's when she left work and headed back to the scene where the road would remain closed for much of the day.

“One cop was directing traffic, but he wouldn't let me go by. He called two other officers who were working closer to the scene. They walked over and told me,” she said.

“It was just the worst, worst day of my life. We were supposed to go skiing on that Saturday, and that was his funeral.

“I do all his chores; I even took a plumbing course. My life is so changed. We were just married a very short time. We were just like kids. We had date nights. He wrote me poetry. He actually treated me like a princess,” Lea said.

bhookway@newstote.com