Boy scared to be alone after tragic crash

“Anything you ask him, he answering - I go dead? I going to dead?” said Kevin Mohammed as he described the state of Nyeem Mohammed, Carolyn’s second son.

According to Kevin, Nyeem was sleeping in the back seat of his mother’s beige coloured Nissan Almera when it collided with a Southern Food Basket truck along the Taskar Road. Carolyn died on the spot, and Nyeem suffered fractures to his spine and pelvis and was taken to the San Fernando General Hospital (SFGH).

“That impact fling he about like a dummy in the back there,” said Kevin.

Nyeem is still warded at the SFGH, and according to family, though he is not in critical condition, he is distraught, scared, and cannot be left alone.

Nyeem, his brother, mother and father shared their No. 5 Sankar Trace home with Kevin, his wife and two children, and their grandmother. According to Kevin, Nyeem was especially close to Carolyn, as he shared a room with her.

“He cannot sleep without the mother,” said Kevin, “if you take him to sleep somewhere else, he does wake up in the night and bawl - where meh mother? Where meh mother?” Nyeem has been instructed to not move too much while his fractured spine heals to prevent further damage.

Asked whether Nyeem was under any threat of being paralyzed, Kevin said that Nyeem had feeling in his all of his limbs.

Kevin’s daughter Karrisa, 15, however, has been burdened by survivor’s guilt ever since the accident.

According to her, her aunt Carolyn asked her to accompany her to pick up her sons from school. “I would usually sit in the front seat,” she said, thinking about the images of the crushed Almera, its dashboard crumpled into the passenger seat where she would have sat. “I told her I couldn’t go because I was cleaning my room.

I was shocked when I heard what happened and I cried.” Talim Mohammed, 33, Carolyn’s youngest brother, reminisced with his brother Kevin on times spent with their “big sister”. “Meh only sister, boy, meh one and only sister,” said Talim. “I cry when she get married and I cry again when she died.” The close knit family all grew up in that same house on Sankar Trace, but according to family, Carolyn and her husband recently bought their own house on Point Coco Road, on the way to Granville. They would spend the work week in Princes Town and the weekend in Point Coco.

“She recently furnished the house and was going to move in permanently just now,” said Kevin, “but look what happen.” Kevin said Carolyn also planned to visit the United States with her husband next year.