Senior Reporter
sascha.wilson@guardian.co.tt
Sixty-year-old Bachan Samlal — who was partially paralysed by a stroke — was unable to escape as flames tore through his home at Sand Hill Trace, Barrackpore, on Sunday.
Despite attempts by neighbours and relatives to extinguish the blaze, the entire wooden three-bedroom house was destroyed, and his charred remains were found near the ruins of his bed.
Samlal, a father of seven and grandfather of 11, lived alone, but one of his daughters would sometimes stay with him occasionally.
On Sunday, he was alone at home.
His estranged common-law wife, Shirley Rampersad, who lives next door, said she was on the road around 5.30 pm when she noticed smoke coming from inside his home.
“When I call out to him, and by the time I reach here, the whole house was ablaze,” she said. She began shouting for help as flames rapidly spread through the structure.
“I call out to him. My neighbour and them run in when I start to bawl and call. Everybody come out and they try to out the fire, but it had no water in the pipe. So they try whatever little they could find — bucket and barrel — they try to out it, but it was too much.”
When firefighters from the Mon Repos Fire Headquarters arrived, Samlal’s house had already burnt to the ground, and when the blaze was extinguished, they discovered his remains. “They found him just by the bed, to the side of the bed. I don’t know if he fall down and he try to get up, but he has the stroke, so even if he fall down, he wouldn’t be able to get back up. The right side — his hand and his foot — he would not move it. He just used to use the left side of his body,” Rampersad said.
She said she had seen Samlal about 25 minutes before the fire and had hoped that he was not inside.
“We was not sure if he step out, if he got into the washroom. We wasn’t sure. That is why when I keep calling and didn’t get no response, we didn’t know what to think because we wanted to believe that he was outside.”
She described Samlal as a generally kind man who had stopped drinking after falling ill. Rampersad said Samlal was also a heart patient and received public assistance.
“To my knowledge, nothing was lighting at the time. He’s a smoker also, so I don’t know if he was smoking and it fall. I can’t say,” she added.
The cause of the fire, however, remains under investigation. The family has not yet finalised funeral arrangements as the autopsy is yet to be done.
