Richard Fresco, 29, of Angoy’s Avenue, New Amsterdam who had fractured his spine when he fell from a truck in April last year, succumbed yesterday at the New Amsterdam Hospital.
He had recently contracted pneumonia and was hospitalized since last Friday, his elderly mother, Virginia Giddings told Stabroek News last evening.
She said when she visited him at the hospital after 6 am yesterday he asked her to help him to sit up. Shortly after, she recalled, he started having difficulty breathing and the nurses immediately administered oxygen.
By the time she returned for the midday visit she was told that he had died. In tears, the grieving woman who had to care for her son “like a baby” said Richard never got to realize his dream of walking again.
Giddings said too that before being admitted to the hospital Richard had stopped talking for four days and was only consuming liquid.
According to her he had also “stopped feeling pain.”
At the time of the accident, Richard was working at a sawmill to provide for his mother and two nephews; John, 12, and Isaac, 11, and an eight-year-old niece, Holly.
They were also living in a dilapidated house and he had dreamed of earning enough to fix it up. His dreams were shattered after he fell until the Oldendorff Bauxite Company provided them with a new house a few months later.
Antje El Dib and her husband, Zakaria El Dib of Oldendorff also summoned the help of businesspersons in New Amsterdam to complete the project so that Richard and his mother along with the children could have a comfortable life.
The company along with other persons had been providing the family with money and food packages.
The Benschop Foundation had also provided Richard with a new wheelchair.
But recently Giddings had told this newspaper that they were no longer receiving any help and that their life had become difficult.
She was very optimistic though that “God would help me; when one door close many more gon open.”
She said the Benschop Foundation was trying to acquire the money for Richard to have a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan done to see if surgery was possible.
Richard had told this newspaper that he was “glad for the scan because it would help me to have my life back. Right now I deh bad hey; when the rain fall I trembling.”
He was also getting a lot of discomfort in his hands, back and belly from being one place all the time.
Giddings had said she was trying to get public assistance for her three grandchildren.
