‘I stared death in the face’

AS HE CLUNG to the front bumper of a moving cement truck that rolled over him, wheelchair-bound John Caesar thought he was staring death in its face. “The first thing that run through my mind was to hold on to the bumper of the truck. I held on to it and the next thing I was waking up in the hospital,” Caesar related from his hospital bed yesterday. The 52-year-old man, who is paralysed from his waist down, was run over by a cement truck and dragged for about 54 feet on Tuesday evening before the truck-driver realised that there was something under his vehicle. The incident occurred around 5.45 pm, near the intersection of Cipero Road and the Rienzi-Kirton Highway, San Fernando.

Nursing two deep wounds to his head, which had to be stitched, a broken vertebra in his lower back, a laceration on his hip and cuts and bruises on his back, Caesar was in high spirits as he lay in his bed on Ward 7 of the San Fernando General Hospital. Caesar believes his fast thinking, strong arms and his wheelchair saved him from death. Recalling the incident yesterday, he said: “I just bought chicken and chips by Royal Castle at Cross Crossing and was returning home. I saw that the light turned green but the vehicles had stopped.”  He said as he rolled his chair onto the road he saw a “big truck coming on top of him”. Caesar said he grabbed on to its bumper and in that split second he thought about how much he loved his wife of 14 years and God.

“Even though you might not think about God all the time, you think about him whenever you are in danger,” he said.  Caesar said he slipped into unconsciousness shortly after, but he was told the wheelchair collapsed and he knocked his head on the ground. He said the wheelchair partly shielded his body but his back “grated” on the road.  While he is happy to be alive, Caesar said he desperately needs a new wheelchair.  “Without it, I cannot move about,” he said. The physically challenged man, who resides with his wife Josephine at the Cheshire Foundation Home, Pleasantville, usually sells tickets for fund-raising events at the Home at Cross Crossing.  He sustained the spinal injuries which left him wheelchair bound in 1979 — he was sitting on bleachers at the Queen’s Park Savannah along with other persons when it collapsed and fell on top of him. A few years later, he met his wife who is also confined to a wheelchair.