A 67-year-old Rural Con- stable attached to the Beterverwagting Police Station was yesterday fatally struck by a minibus which she had seconds before disembarked at Pigeon Island, East Coast Demerara.
Nazartoon ‘Patsy’ Ali, of Pigeon Island, E.C.D., died after the minibus, licence plate BHH 4460, reversed to collect passengers, hitting the elderly woman in the process.
She was said to have stepped out of the vehicle and was at the back of it, anticipating crossing the road when the accident occurred.
Police in a press release said that the accident occurred at around 11:30 am. According to the release, the driver of the minibus made a U-turn on the road and struck the woman down. The woman was pronounced dead on arrival at the Georgetown Public Hospital.
Police said that the driver of the minibus has been arrested and is in custody assisting with the investigations.
When this newspaper visited her home, the woman’s grandson, Royston Dorwark said he had arrived from Suriname around midday and upon arrival, he was told by neighbours that the woman had left for the Mon Repos Market to purchase shrimp and would return shortly.
The man said he decided to wait but after about an hour passed, he became worried and decided to call her cellular phone. “I call and a man picked up and normally only she picks it up, not even her husband answers her phone. The man asked me this is who, I said Patsy grandson and he said come down to the hospital. I went there, they took me to show me her and she was already in ice, in the mortuary,” the man said.
Dorwark said that according to what he was told by eyewitnesses, the woman had just disembarked from the bus in front of Chester’s Chicken and was about to cross the road.
He pointed out that persons reported that the bus rolled over the woman and her body had to be pulled from underneath. “She was behind the bus on the driver’s side, he looked to the mirror at the passenger seat and saw passengers and was reversing to pick them up without looking at his mirror or the middle mirror… she was standing behind the bus on his side… The conductor supposed to see her go around the bus. I’m a driver. When you reverse, you do not look at one mirror. You look at all three mirrors,” the man said frustratingly.
He added that his grandmother had a large sum of money on her which he was not handed at the hospital. “I know my grandmother. She always walk with money on her.
She never leave her money in this house, never! She had box money to give to people and she never left that money at home since I know her.
She had about $56,000 money to pay out. At the hospital, them give me her phone and her ring alone what she had on,” he related.
Dorwark further stated that he is doubtful that the driver in this matter will be brought to justice for the death of his grandmother and assumed that he will soon be released on bail.
“I get to hear that a lot of people buying their licence over here. I’m a Surinamese. We don’t buy licence.
You have to study hard to get that licence. That driver there, he will be out on bail. In Suriname, that will never happen. They take your licence and you go to jail with no bail. Here in Guyana, everything is money,” Dorwark stated.
The man noted that the driver was pointed out to him by lawmen and when approached, the man expressed no sympathy for him and his family. “They show me the person and I ask him if he didn’t have eye for see and he told me I must not speak like that to him, that his family there,” he added furiously.
At the GPH yesterday, the tearful driver and his conductor were seen giving their statements at the hospital’s outpost.
When approached by Stabroek News, the conductor, who said his name was Anthony, explained that they had picked the woman up at the Mon Repos Market and put her off at Pigeon Island.
According to him, the driver, whose name he gave as Badal, looked back and looked forward again as he reversed and before he realized it the woman was behind the bus.
He added that the passengers were offloaded and Ali was placed in the bus. He said she was believed to have died while travelling to the hospital. She was pronounced dead on arrival.
