One dead, five injured in accident

Shamir Brown – Trelawny Correspondent

The death toll on the nation’s roads inched up by one on Wednesday, when a woman lost her life in a two-vehicle collision along the Unity Hall main road in St. James, which also resulted in five other persons being injured.

Sixty-five-year-old Grace Holmes, of Atlanta, Georgia in the United States of America (USA), was reported dead at the Cornwall Regional Hospital as a result of injuries she received in the accident.

Reports from the Freeport Police are that about 10:40 a.m., Holmes was a passenger in a Honda City motorcar travelling towards Hopewell district, when on reaching a section of the Unity Hall main road, the driver of a Nissan Sunny motorcar, travelling in the opposite direction, proceeded to overtake a line of traffic and allegedly lost control of the vehicle, which collided head-on with the Honda City in the vicinity of the Chalet Caribe. The impact caused both vehicles to careen off the roadway and into a nearby ditch.

According to eyewitness reports, Holmes, who was travelling with two other female friends en route to Negril, was sitting in the back seat, when she was reportedly flung forward, head first into the windshield. Her two traveling companions, who were in the front, were reportedly wearing seatbelts at the time.

Three persons were also travelling in the Sunny Nissan motorcar, two males and a female, with the female reportedly receiving chest injuries.

All six occupants of both motor vehicles involved in the crash were taken to hospital for treatment, where Miss Holmes was pronounced dead.

Meanwhile, Gary McKenzie, Deputy Superintendent of Police in charge of Operations for St. James, indicated that the driver of the Nissan Sunny motorcar had just passed a vehicular checkpoint mounted by the police prior to the accident.

He is appealing to motorists to take greater responsibility when traversing the roads.

“It is very important that we get this right; our road safety and responsibility, as drivers because we continue to have incidents of this sort when clearly, the roadway and the amount of traffic that is on the road does not allow for this kind of driving. And so we continue to appeal to drivers to be more responsible in their approach to driving”, DSP McKenzie said.