Baby boy, 3, perishes in fire

An autopsy yesterday confirmed that the child died from smoke inhalation. The autopsy was carried out at the Forensic Sciences Centre in St James by pathologist Dr Eastlyn Mc Donald Burris.

So overcome with grief, Germia’s mother Allison Dick struggled to speak as she recalled the short life and times of the last of her four children.

Dick said she was hanging laundry on a clothesline at the back of the house at about 4.30 pm, leaving her children watching television in the living room of the two-bedroom wooden house. She said she also had a pot on the stove in the kitchen.

“I had put some peas to burst and left the children inside watching TV. By the time I reach to hang out the clothes, I hear my daughter Vanessa, bawling ‘Mammy come quick’. I saw the house burning and ran towards the door, falling about four times in my haste to get inside,” Dick said.

The woman said when she saw only three of her four children - Vanessa, Akeem, seven, and Carlon, five - she ran inside the burning building in search of Atiba. “I believe the fire started on a mattress,” she said.

“I went in the bedroom and saw him crouched behind some barrels. He always hid there when he did something wrong.”

Dick told Newsday she believed Atiba lit a piece of paper from the flames under the boiling pot on the stove and was playing with it on a bed. The mattress caught fire and the blaze spread rapidly through the wooden house.

Realising she could not get to Atiba, Dick tried to move the stove to gain access but was thwarted by the flames. In desperation, she ran out of the house to get water but all of the nearby taps were dry since the village had no pipe-borne water for the past few weeks.

Within minutes, the house was engulfed in flames and the child perished. “He didn’t even call out again,” Dick said. The child’s funeral has been tentatively set for Tuesday. Moruga Police are continuing investigations.