Derek Achong

A 36-year-old truck dri­ver from San­gre Grande died in an ac­ci­dent in Ch­agua­nas on Sat­ur­day night. 

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports, around 10 pm Mar­cus Leza­ma was dri­ving a truck and trail­er with a ship­ment of frozen French fries along the north-bound lane of the Solomon Ho­choy High­way, when he got a “bad-dri­ve” near the Mod­ern Elec­tri­cal Lim­it­ed build­ing. 

Leza­ma, of Fos­ter Ex­ten­sion Road, San­gre Grande, al­leged­ly swerved to avoid col­lid­ing with the ve­hi­cle and lost con­trol of his truck. The truck and trail­er fish­tailed and went in­to a ditch that sep­a­rates the high­way from the South­ern Main Road. 

The ship­ping con­tain­er par­tial­ly de­tached from the trail­er and fell on the cab of the truck with Leza­ma in­side. 

Fire of­fi­cers re­spond­ing to the scene re­moved Leza­ma from the wreck­age and took him to the Ch­agua­nas Health Fa­cil­i­ty for treat­ment. He was pro­nounced dead on ar­rival. 

In a brief in­ter­view at her home in Mal­abar, Ari­ma, yes­ter­day, Leza­ma’s sis­ter Yolande de­scribed her broth­er as hard-work­ing and am­bi­tious. 

“We grow up hard but he al­ways de­ter­mined to make it,” his sis­ter said, as she ex­plained that their moth­er passed away when they were chil­dren and they were raised by rel­a­tives.

Yolande said her broth­er had fin­ished build­ing his house in San­gre Grande and was work­ing on build­ing a set of apart­ments to sup­ple­ment his in­come.  

“He al­ways used to say that when he was ready to set­tle down and have chil­dren he want­ed to have every­thing in place so they would not have to go through what we had to,” she said. 

She said her broth­er al­ways loved trucks and be­gan dri­ving them as soon as he turned 18 and got his dri­ver’s per­mit. 

“First he used to pull grav­el and then he move on to trail­er trucks. The on­ly li­cense he was miss­ing was a pi­lot li­cense,” she said.  

A post-mortem is ex­pect­ed to be per­formed on Leza­ma’s body at the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre in St James to­day. 

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that the wreck­age re­mained in the same po­si­tion up to yes­ter­day af­ter­noon, as of­fi­cials of the trans­port com­pa­ny Leza­ma worked for sur­veyed the scene to de­ter­mine the safest method to re­move it from the deep ditch. 

There were re­ports of traf­fic con­ges­tion along the high­way, around 4 pm, as cranes were tak­en in to re­move the wreck­age.