Residents of Febeau Village, San Juan, were thrown into a state of shock yesterday, after a 62-year-old mother of five was killed in a freak accident in their village when a stack of metal rods fell off a transport truck and impaled her behind the steering wheel of her car.Police said around 2.30 pm, Joycelyn Marquis-Taylor, of Sun Valley Drive, La Pastora, Santa Cruz, was driving south along the Saddle Road when the truck carrying various lengths metal rods passed alongside her.
Police said the rope holding the rods together became untied and several lengths fell onto the roadway. However, some the rods bounced on the roadways, landed on the bonnet of Marquis-Taylor's Nissan AD Wagon and entered through the windscreen. One of the lengths impaled Marquis-Taylor, who was the secretary to the priest at the Santa Cruz RC Church, through the right side of the face. She was pronounced dead on the scene by a district medical officer.
When a news team from the T&T Guardian visited the scene yesterday, the several lengths of bent metal were seen protruding from Marquis-Taylor's vehicle. As residents and curious onlookers took pictures of Marquis-Taylor's disfigured body, police officers quickly covered it with a blanket.
The scores of onlookers, which included several schoolchildren, only dispersed after fire officers arrived on the scene to assist in removing the woman from her vehicle. The accident caused traffic flowing on both sides of the road to grind to a halt for several hours and it was only normalised after 5 pm.
Marquis-Taylor's cellphone was heard ringing in her car, but police did not answer the calls. Her relatives had not arrived on the scene before her body was taken away by undertakers, with a source close to the family saying that police at the Sant Cruz station were unable to give her son an escort to the scene because of a manpower shortage.
Police wrecked the two vehicles and took them to the Santa Cruz station. The driver of the truck was detained by police and was being interrogated up to late yesterday. Eyewitnesses, who asked to remain unidentified, said that immediately after the accident, the truck driver got out of his vehicle and burst into tears and screamed."I did that? I did that?" the driver reportedly asked in disbelief after the accident.Residents questioned why the load of metal was not properly secured.
"That man should have known that he had to secure that properly. That metal was bouncing in that truck since he was coming up the road," one man said.Investigations are continuing.