A 40-year-old father of three lost his life on Sunday evening when the car he was driving became involved in a collision with another car on Mandela Avenue, at the junction of the bridge leading to South Ruimveldt.
Feroze Bacchus, a taxi driver and former laboratory technician attached to the Ministry of Health and of 121 ‘BB’ Eccles, East Bank Demerara died shortly after he arrived at the Georgetown Public Hospital. His relatives said the driver’s side of his car, a silver Corolla with number place, PJJ 6464, was smashed in.
Speaking to Stabroek News yesterday morning the man’s 23-year-old daughter Yolanda said her father arrived home around 8.30 pm on Sunday, but said he had to go out again for a short while.
She said not long after her father left they received a call informing them that he had been involved in an accident. And before they could have left the home another call came through, delivering the tragic news.
She said initially they did not believe, but then they saw his body on arrival at the hospital. She recalled that her father was in good spirits when he last left the house and it was hard to imagine that he is no more. The weeping young woman said that from the sketchy information they received her father’s car was involved in a collision with another car. She said his friends had either spotted his car in the accident or received a call from his cellular phone telling them he was in an accident. She said the friends reported that her father was talking all the way to the hospital. But when he arrived at the institution he gave them his car keys and told them to take care of his family. “They said he just turn his head to the wall, because he was lying on a stretcher, and he was gone,” the man’s daughter said.
She said when she and her mother Annette, who had been married to the man for the past 13 years, arrived at the hospital, her mother refused to accept that the man was dead. “We never left the hospital till after two in the morning, because I sit with her as she said he would have got up again. It was only when relatives come from Mahaica and told her it was time to go we left. Right now she is uncontrollable,” Yolanda said.
She said her father was a “big man” as he weighed 260 pounds and he was tall as well. From all indications, his head slammed into the car’s windscreen causing him to receive massive head injuries. She said her father was wearing his seat belt at the time but there was an indentation on the windscreen indicating where he had hit his head.
Praising her father, who she said was always there for his family, Yolanda said every Sunday night he would take them to the seawalls, after which they would go to a fast food outlet and eat fried chicken. However, because lent is approaching, she said, he told them that they should not go.
Instead, they had a very good lunch and had meat with the intention of not eating any more meat for the next 40 days as they are Roman Catholics. “He even brought home a bottle of wine for my mother last night and he said he was coming back just now,” she said.
“I am in shock. It still feels like a dream and I would wake up from it just now,” she said.
She said her father had been a lab technician for years and he worked with the Ministry of Health in the malaria section. But about a year ago, he started also working his car as a taxi.
Apart from his wife and daughter Bacchus also leaves two young sons to mourn his death.
Stabroek News understands that the driver of the other car is in police custody.
On Friday night, a motorcycle ridden by Guyana Post Office Corporation employee Ryan Mc Bean ploughed into Neil Overton, who was pushing his amputee wife Yonette Mc Donald along Mandela Avenue in a wheelchair. Mc Bean and Overton dies, while Mc Donald was admitted to hospital in a critical condition.
