The driver who struck down and injured 11-year-old Adalia George while she was using a pedestrian crossing along the Grove, East Bank Demerara (EBD) Public Road was on November 27th sentenced to six months in jail after he pleaded guilty to three charges including dangerous driving.
The charges were read to Ronald Jairam when he appeared in the Providence Magistrate’s Court.
He pleaded guilty to dangerous driving and driving an uninsured and unlicensed vehicle.
While Jairam was sentenced for dangerous driving, he was fined the sum of $40,000 each for the other two offences.
The accident which had occurred around 3.55 pm had left George, a Grade Six student of Soesdyke Primary School nursing severe injuries about her body.
She was discharged from the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPH) on Saturday and is currently recovering at home.
The accident occurred while George and her two of her siblings were making their way across the public road using a pedestrian crossing.
They were returning to their Kaneville, Grove, EBD home after school and had just disembarked a minibus.
The accident was recorded by a nearby surveillance camera and circulated on Facebook.
In the 13-second video which was seen by this newspaper, George and her two siblings were seen crossing the road together.
As a car waited at the pedestrian crossing for the children to cross the road, another car, which appeared to be heavily tinted, appeared and struck George. She was hit into the air and fell onto the roadway.
George’s siblings were then seen rushing to her assistance.
Allison Arthur, the injured child’s mother and a teacher at the Soesdyke Primary School had told Stabroek News that she and the three children would usually travel to and from home on a daily basis.
However, Arthur said she took the day off that day to transact business in Georgetown.
She said her older daughter had related to her that at the time of the accident Adalia was a short distance ahead of them since she had told them that she wanted to get home quickly.
The woman had expressed frustration at the manner in which the accident occurred, while noting that her children do not play on the road and that she ensured that she educated them about how to use the roadways safely.
“We believe that the pedestrian [crossing] is safe. You teach your children that… I am telling you about what we teach the children at school, so they accustomed to it. So she just briskly hurrying home—remember you can’t crawl going over there, vehicles waiting—and so happen that my big daughter told me that she stepped up a little bit, a little brisk to go ahead of them a little and not by much and this car just picked her up and my daughter said she felt the vibration because she said she barely make a thing back, because little more she would have gotten hit and the brother was right next to her,” Arthur had explained.
