Carisa Lee
Reporter
carisa.lee@cnc3.co.tt
On Sunday afternoon, when Timothy Thomas, 22, was about to take a rest, his grandmother asked him to drive to the family’s business, and he agreed.
“I was not supposed to be there on that day. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was going to sleep. My family was going to be the ones driving and going to see about the place, I was not,” he told Guardian Media in a Zoom interview.
As he was driving along John Dial Road in Tobago around 5 pm, he noticed a vehicle approaching from the opposite direction with no driver behind the wheel. The young man, now being hailed as a hero, immediately sprang into action and stopped the vehicle.
“After looking at the vehicle, I realised that there’s no driver in it. It was moving uncontrollably in my direction, on my lane, the opposite direction, on my lane ...” he said.
He caught up with the gold Toyota Axio and only then realised that a child was in the back seat. Timothy managed to enter the moving vehicle, take control, and bring it to a safe stop. He then attended to the little girl.
“So the handbrakes were up. I did not have to pull the handbrakes up, afterwards. I picked up the young lady, and I came out of the vehicle,” he said.
Thomas said it was a moment of relief for the grandmother who was the driver of the car that unexpectedly rolled away with the child still in the back seat.
Fruit vendor Kern Walters, who the woman had stopped to purchase watermelon from, witnessed the incident and said that God put Thomas in the right place at the right time.
“Whilst I was cutting the watermelon she had the car started with the child in the car, and we didn’t know, the car took off, and we started running behind the car because somebody raised an alarm. He saved the day, the car didn’t get touched, the baby didn’t get damage and everything was real good; it was a blessing in disguise,” he said.
Thomas said the woman was devastated and shaking uncontrollably after the incident. He said she was very grateful for his help, but asked for privacy at this time. Thomas believes that his spiritual grounding led him there.
“She thanked me a lot. But I tell her, you don’t have to thank me, you have to thank God and continue to keep on the path with Christ because that’s the biggest part of everything,” he said.
While Thomas does not have a social media presence, his heroic save was captured and shared by Tobagonian tailor Andrew John Smith.
He wants young people to know that it’s not too late for God to use them for good.
“Just be this person that somebody can relate to on a peaceful level on a daily basis. It’s very easy to pick up a knife. It’s very easy to pick up a gun. It’s very easy to snatch my bag. It’s very easy to do the wrong set of things. I am not perfect. Nobody is perfect,” he said.
