Muddy road blamed for death

SPILLED backfill is being blamed for causing the accident which claimed the life of Annise Sakawath and left one of her best friends in critical condition at hospital.

Annise, 21, Preya Samuel, 20, and Vinnita Sookraj, 21, were headed to Samuel’s Crawford Trace, Penal home around 11.30 am on Wednesday when Samuel skidded on the dirt and lost control of her Toyota Ceres car which slammed into a utility pole.

The car flipped and Annise was thrown through the back windscreen. An autopsy at the San Fernando mortuary yesterday found she died from cranial haemorrhaging (bleeding of the brain).

Samuel’s relatives said it was raining at the time of the accident, turning the normally smooth roadway into a danger zone.

Sookraj is warded at San Fernando General Hospital in critical condition with six broken ribs and a punctured lung.

Samuel is also at hospital, in serious but stable condition. Samuel’s brother Shekhar Samuel said he last saw the young women happily making plans to spend the day together when they dropped him off to classes at Penal Secondary School.

“I told Preya to be careful driving back home cause the roads were wet and she said ‘Ok.’ Then later on in the day I heard they were in an accident,” Shekhar said.

He said Preya told him the last thing she remembered was the car starting to skid on the muddy road and hitting the pole.

Shekhar said Samuel did not know where Annise was. Annise had been thrown from the vehicle and landed face-down in a drain.

Speaking from her family’s Penal Rock Road, Penal home yesterday, Annise’s older sister Anneshah Sakawath said Annise and Vinnita were supposed to celebrate their 22nd birthdays this Sunday.

Annise was a first year Internet and Information Technology student at the National Energy Skills Centre’s Debe campus.

Anneshah said the family is disappointed at the number of people who stopped at the accident scene, not to help, but to take photos and videos of her sister’s body.

To those who recorded the victims’ suffering, Anneshah had this to say: “If you know you are not going to help people, then don’t stop. There were so many people there who said my sister was still breathing after the accident and they were only concerned with going ‘live’ on Facebook so as to make themselves popular.”