(Trinidad Express) – All that remained of six-year-old Khris Ramkhelawan were his burnt bones after the car in which the boy was a back-seat passenger burst into flames after slamming into a guard rail along the Southern Main Road near Trantrill Road, Spring Village.
Khris was asleep on the back-seat of the car, a Mazda 323, driven by his father, Anthony Ramkhelawan.
Ramkhelawan was heading north along the main road around 3 am on Sunday when his car came into contact with a green Nissan Sunny heading in the opposite direction
Both cars barely touched each other.
But it was enough to send Ramkhelawan’s vehicle into the railing placed to protect and guide vehicles from going into the nearby river.
The railing was ripped out its base by the impact.
The impact caused the car to burst into flames.
Khris was trapped in the vehicle and burnt to death while his father and a front-seat passenger Rikki Mukesh escaped with minor injuries.
When the Express visited the scene, the area where the car caught fire was marked by ashes, broken glass, a broken guard rail and the remnants of the car.
A burnt shirt was discovered several feet away from the spot where the crash happened.
Curious drivers slowed down to take a look at the accident.
Ramkhelawan cried at his Lilly Trace home at Siparia on Sunday morning when the Express visited.
“I couldn’t save Khris. He didn’t deserve to die. He was such a happy child. If only I had a little more time to pull him to safety,” he said.
Relatives gathered to console the bereaved father.
Surviving the blast that followed, Ramkhelawan, 38, said he visited relatives and was returning home when the accident occurred.
He said he remembered crossing the Caroni Bridge and the cars colliding.
“I was knocked out for a while and when I recovered I tried to get out of the car,” he said. He said that his shirt was caught and he was struggling to remove it when the car exploded. “There was no time to save my son,” he said.
The Caroni Presbyterian School pupil was on a weekend visit with his father when the accident occurred.
Passenger Mukesh, of Penal, escaped the blaze.
The driver of the Nissan also escaped uninjured.
A relative of the dead child, Denise Rooplal, said that Khris was the most loving child.