Victims’ family want streetlights, better roads

KILLED: Daniel Pinto
KILLED: Daniel Pinto

STANLEY Pinto, brother of 61-year-old accident victim Daniel Pinto, believes his brother and sister-in-law’s deaths could have been avoided if there was proper infrastructure along the Arima Old Road, where the couple died late on Sunday afternoon.

Speaking with Newsday at the Forensic Science Centre in St James yesterday, Pinto said when he arrived at the scene with his wife Earla, his 17-year-old son Quincy, who was in the car with his aunt and uncle at the time of the accident, was visibly shaken and had suffered injuries to his arms and legs from climbing up the steep cliff the car had driven over.

Pinto said there were no lights and bush made the car invisible from the road. He said his brother had invited Quincy to come up and spend the evening at his home in Arima. “A few hours after they left, my wife was about to call them when she got a phone call from Quincy, who said that the car they were travelling in went over a cliff and crashed. He said he managed to climb up from the car back onto the road, where he managed to get a passer-by to lend him his cell phone.”

Pinto said he and his wife called the police, but by the time they arrived it was already dark and they could not see the crashed car from the road.

He said Quincy managed to mark the spot where the accident happened, using the back piece of the cell phone, and was only able to find the right place by using that as a landmark.

“We could only see a tip of one of the car’s headlights from where we were on the road. We had to walk down a really steep path to get to the vehicle, which was tangled in some strong vines at the bottom of the cliff. Those vines were really what was holding it in place, otherwise the car would have continued to fall all the way down to the lower part of the road below.”

Pinto said when they finally reached the car, only the body of his sister-in-law Evangeline was inside. They began a frantic search for his brother, who had been tossed from the driver’s seat and was left tangled in the branch of a tree as the car rolled down the cliff. An autopsy yesterday showed Daniel Pinto died of multiple injuries and severe internal bleeding.

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"Victims’ family want streetlights, better roads"

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