A 14 year old girl is now fighting for her life in the Intensive Care Unit of the Georgetown Public Hospital after she was hit by a speeding route 42 minibus on the Golden Grove Public Road, East Bank Demerara yesterday afternoon.
Rosetta Garnett, of 216 Grove/ Caneville and of Xenon School, according to relatives, had just crossed the road at the corner of Servan Street when a minibus suddenly appeared travelling up the East Bank. It then overtook a bus which was at the time passing another minibus heading in the opposite direction, and hit the child, dragging her about two yards before coming to a halt.
Speaking with Stabroek News last evening at the hospital, the child’s grandmother Monica Dummet said just about 20 minutes before the accident she sent Rosetta out to the main road to help set up her blackpudding stand.
She said the child held the stand for her until she had completed making her other dishes which she sold every Saturday afternoon.
“So when I come out the road I sent her back in to collect some fried fish and she left. By the time I turn around to fix something on the stall, I hear this big impact and I start screaming because the bus was dragging her and she had her hands to her side and her eyes shut tight,” the visibly distraught woman recounted.
She said she immediately ran to rescue the child who she said was not moving and was bleeding badly.
“I get frighten and I start shake she and I tell she don’t die ‘cos I rear she from three months old and I does work real hard to look after my grandchildren,” the woman said as she broke into tears.
Relatives told Stabroek News that after the driver realized he had hit the child he took a while before he came out of the vehicle and it was the passengers in the bus who told him that he should take the child to the hospital.
The woman said too that the driver ignored them, but they later learnt that he had gone to the police station.
Relatives were assisted by another minibus driver who volunteered to take the child to the hospital.
A police source told this newspaper that the minibus driver had claimed that the child was in the middle of the road and then turned back, and he had not realized that she had made a turn and was continuing to cross the road. The relatives, however, insisted that she was almost across the road when she was hit.
Last evening relatives sat on the benches at the hospital, hoping and praying for the best. The child is in a critical state.
