Sad Story
The amount of deaths in Guyana is too high.
Half of the Guyanese are dying out by accidents and half are migrating. Soon there'll be no Guyana.
-- pregnant victim suffers
spontaneous abortion
By Dale Andrews
The country's road fatality figure took a big jump with the deaths of six persons in a horrific accident on the Rupert Craig Highway in the vicinity of Bel Air, just before midday yesterday.
Anil Singh, 26, of Block CC Mon Repos; his pregnant wife, Famedia, 24; his sister, Reneka Singh, 25, of Ogle, and two other young relatives — 12-year-old Alasie Samaroo and Sherry Puran, 11, all perished when the car they were travelling in crashed into a fence before slamming into a guard hut, killing 57-year-old security guard Nandram Ramgopaul.
Anil Singh and his wife were sitting in the front seats of the car, while Reneka Singh, Alasie Samaroo and Puran were in the back.
The five passengers in the car were all killed instantly, while Ramgopaul succumbed at the Georgetown Hospital a few hours later.
Famedia Singh, a former teacher at the Apex Academy and who was eight months pregnant, suffered a spontaneous abortion. The foetus was visible at the scene of the accident.
At least one of the victims had her skull split.
The doomed car, a Toyota Mark Two, PGG 7348, which was loaned to Anil Singh, is a total wreck, with the engine and gearbox separating from the vehicle and landing several metres away.
Rescuers had to use several instruments to cut some of the bodies from the wreckage, after pulling it down from on top of the fence, where it landed after flying off the road.
So disfigured were some of the faces that relatives at first could not recognise the victims.
The accident was reportedly caused when one of the rear tyres blew out. Eyewitnesses said that after the blowout, the driver, Anil Singh, an auto electrician, tried to swerve the out-of-control vehicle to avoid hitting a minibus.
He, however, succeeded in sending the car smashing into a concrete fence before slamming into the guard hut of the Oceanic (Shivraj) apartments in Bel Air.
According to the eyewitnesses, the car was travelling at a terrific rate of speed.
This newspaper was told that Singh and the other passengers had just left their home at Mon Repos and were heading to Parika when the mishap occurred.
One of Singh's brothers said that his brother was going to Parika to collect money that was owed to him and decided to carry his wife, sister and the two children for the drive.
Famedia Singh and her sister-in-law Reneka were both the only girls for their respective parents.
“They just left me at Good Hope, saying that they going to Parika,” Savita Singh, the dead driver's sister-in-law said.
At the scene was Acting Police Commissioner Henry Greene, who was among several other senior officers, including Acting Traffic Chief Neil Semple and Divisional Commander Leroy Brumell.
Both the Acting Commissioner and the Traffic Chief attributed the cause of the accident to speeding.
Some Mon Repos residents also supported this theory, since they claimed that Singh was well known for driving at a fast rate of speed.
“I am not surprised, because he does really drive fast,” a Mon Repos resident told this newspaper.
The carnage caused a major blockage of the Main East Coast Demerara Highway , as curious motorists stopped to get a glimpse of the graphic scenes, which were reminiscent of another horrific smash-up in the mining town of Linden 12 days ago.
On that occasion, 10 people died.
And in a related incident, police arrested a man who attempted to steal the belongings of the victims even as several persons were trying to remove them from the wreckage.
The man was caught with a handbag and a cellular phone which were taken from the mangled vehicle.
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