'National Disaster', ten killed in crashes over Easter holidays

A "national disaster" is what the country's leading road safety advocate is describing the loss of ten people in road fatalities over the four-day Easter holidays, including five on Easter Monday alone.

Five of the victims were pedestrians ages 72, 71, 69, 61 and 28, police records show. The others include two motorcyclists, a pedal cyclist, a private motor car driver and a motor vehicle passenger.

Among the victims were a beloved medical doctor and a family matriarch who was heading to her job as a janitor after making a last-minute decision to skip a family gathering in St Elizabeth.

"The reality is that the long weekend has been a national disaster in respect of road safety," said Dr Lucien Jones, vice chairman of the National Road Safety Council (NRSC).

Ikodel Wright, affectionately called 'Miss Bev', a 71-year-old mother of two, was struck by a minibus while walking along the roadway in Cross Roads, St Andrew, according to a police report.

Private security company KingAlarm has since acknowledged that the vehicle that hit Wright is part of its fleet and insisted that it was not a case of hit-and-run as the driver is cooperating with the police.

However, the deaths of Overton Simpson, a 69-year-old farmer from Ridge district, in St Elizabeth, and Gavin Blake, 28, of Roaring River district, in St Ann, have been classified as hit-and-run incidents.

A total of 118 people have died in 104 fatal crashes across Jamaica between January 1 and yesterday, a 14 per cent decrease in fatalities when compared with the corresponding period last year, according to the latest data published by the Island Traffic Authority (ITA).

The 365 people killed on Jamaica's roadways last year is the lowest in seven years. There were 440 road deaths in 2019; 433 in 2020; 487 in 2021; 488 the following year; and 425 in 2023 the ITA data shows.

A week before the Easter holidays, road deaths were down 21 per cent, Jones noted during an interview yesterday.

"We weren't looking for that because of the decrease we were celebrating so this is a kind of wake-up call...actually there are two wake-up calls," he said.

"One is to tell us that we need to be eternally vigilant, lest you get this kind of surge which can bring us back to the bad old days."

The other, he said, was data just released by the Ministry of Health and Wellness, which shows that over 60 per cent of people injured in motor vehicle crashes last year were not wearing a safety device such as seatbelts or helmets, in the case of motorcyclists.

Women accounted for nearly 65 per cent of those who were not wearing a safety device, he said.

The NRSC vice-chairman said the ultimate goal is for Jamaica to achieve the World Health Organisation-mandated goal of a 50 per cent reduction in the number of road deaths for the "decade of road safety" which ends in 2030.

Jamaica will need to reduce road deaths to 212 by 2030 to achieve this goal.

- Livern Barrett

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