One man is dead and four others are warded in a serious condition at hospital, after the car in which they were travelling collided with a retaining wall in Tobago yesterday morning.
The dead man has been identified as Benton Charles.
Assistant Chief Fire Officer David Joseph-Thomas, who in charge of the Tobago Division, yesterday said Charles, a resident of Bethesda Trace, Bethesda Village, Plymouth, was the front seat passenger in a Nissan Almera which was being driven by his brother.
Around 5.20 am, the driver lost control of the vehicle and rammed in the wall on the corner of Shelbourne Street and Bethesda Trace.
Charles, an employee of the Tobago House of Assembly, was only moments away from his home when tragedy struck.
Firemen used a hydraulic-extrication rescue tool to retrieve the remaining survivors. The other victims were taken by ambulance to the Scarborough General Hospital at Signal Hill.
Zorisha Hackett, the Tobago House of Assembly’s representative for Bethesda/Les Coteaux and councillor Certica Williams Orr, Secretary in the office of the Chief Secretary, were on the scene shortly after tragedy struck.
Hackett said, “At approximately 5.40 am, I received a phone call from three of my cousins telling me to respond quickly to the scene, and that there was a serious accident involving four to five young men at the corner of Shelbourne Street and Bethesda Trace.
“What I heard from them is that this accident would have occurred around 5.17 am. I quickly responded and I saw the body on the road on the side of the car. Villagers were out, mother and stepmother were on the scene, and persons were trying to come to terms with how severe the accident would have been and what would have caused it because it’s just 500 metres away from the actual homes of the young men.
“They were literally home,” she told Guardian Media.
“People were trying to ascertain what happened in that short space of time, where they were coming from,” she added.
Hackett said the stepmother of the deceased was her cousin.
“Three of the other young men seemed to be unresponsive at the time the ambulance would have taken them to the hospital.
“There was another relative of the young men, pregnant (who was a bystander and not in the vehicle), who had a panic attack and had to be taken to the hospital by the ambulance … so several incidents happened at the same time,” she said.
