Dead is Ramona Harris, aged 27 years, of 549 Diamond New Scheme. Harris was on her way home after purchasing a meal when she became the victim of a hit-and-run accident. The incident occurred around 10 pm at the junctions of Eleventh Street and the main access road in the area.
Residents recalled hearing a loud bang around the time Harris was struck down. One woman said the sound of the blow travelled two streets away and she initially thought someone had struck a horse. It was only minutes later that Harris’s badly crushed body was found lying in the grass a considerable distance from the point of impact.
Doctors told Harris’s family that many bones in her body were damaged and reported that her limbs, neck, jawbone, shoulders and ribs were all broken. Her skull was also cracked open as a result of the heavy blow and she bled a lot while lying on the road waiting for an ambulance. Harris died at the Diamond Diagnostic Centre shortly after she was rushed there on Friday night.
A taxi driver, who witnessed the accident, told relatives he was travelling in a car with passengers when another taxi flew past him and struck Harris down. The man said Harris was in the corner of the road about to turn into her street when the car picked her up and tossed her back down into the grass. The taxi driver said he immediately decided to drive behind the man after the car sped away, but the chase ended after a few minutes because the passengers in his car feared for their lives.
“The driver told us that his passengers were worried that the man might have had a gun so he had to abandon the chase,” a relative told Sunday Stabroek yesterday. However, the taxi driver took the licence plate number of the car, and handed it over to the family and to the police.
Oswald Stepheney, Harris’s brother, said he was on his way home when he passed the injured woman lying on the road. He did not recognize his sister, but he stood with the small crowd which had gathered and tried to assist in calling the police and enquiring about an ambulance. The street where the accident happened has no street lights. “I keep looking the woman cause she look familiar, but I couldn’t tell,” Stepheney said.
Stepheney decided to go home and check on his sister only to be confronted with the news that she was not at home. He dashed back into the street and after removing the hair which he said was in her face, he recognized his sister. “I didn’t know what to do because we were told not to move her because of her injuries and the bleeding,” he recalled. He remembered just lying down on the roadside and talking to her for about ten minutes before she was eventually removed and taken to the hospital in a private vehicle.
The man said calls were placed for an ambulance and to the police, but that the ambulance never showed up. Enquiries by the family later revealed that the ambulance driver had trouble locating the keys. Stepheney said he decided to stay close to his sister while she was on the road and to comfort her, because he did not want her to feel that no one close was around. “I wanted her to know that I was there, that someone was there,” he said.
The doctor at the hospital tried with Harris but her injuries were too severe. The family is outraged at the manner in which she was killed and is calling on the police to find the driver who struck her down. They said that people in the area saw him speeding out of the community but at the time many did not know what had happened.
Some residents who had gathered at the family home said the taxi driver who struck Harris appeared to be drunk and that in his bid to escape his car almost ended up in a drain. “We see this man but we didn’t know Jah we didn’t know, a male resident said.
Harris, the third of four children, worked at Hotel Tower. She is survived by her parents, her siblings and a one year-old daughter.
