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Did silence killed Akila Jocobs?

Oct 20, 2008 News

By Michael Jordan

I knew Akila Jacobs; maybe not as well as some of her other colleagues, but enough to have gotten an understanding of her personality.
What I remember more than anything else was her smile. It seemed to me that Akila was always smiling. I would listen to her reporting for NCN and I would imagine her smiling.
I couldn’t imagine anyone turning down an interview with Akila.
So it is hard to believe that she is dead. Even though I wrote the story about her demise, I had to see her smiling face and the headlines in the other newspapers to accept that it was not just a bad dream.
Akila had a zest for life and an enthusiasm for her job, and I would bet that she volunteered to go on Saturday’s trip to Ituni.
I don’t like travelling in mini-buses, particularly on long journeys. I live on the East Bank of Demerara, and it seems as if every day I get a glimpse of the worst aspects of the mini-bus culture.
Practically every mini-bus driver, it seems, believes that he must overtake the vehicle in front of him, cost him what it will.
A few months ago, I had a verbal confrontation with one such driver, who kept veering dangerously close to the edge of the roadway in his demented attempt to overtake everything in his path.
I took a photograph of the driver and his bus and placed them in a special file in my computer that I reserve for rogue drivers.
About a week later, one of my daughters complained to me about a scary experience she had with a Route 42 minibus driver. She recounted that she repeatedly pleaded with this driver to slow down, but was ignored.
Fortunately, she had jotted his license number down. The number and the description she gave of the culprit seemed familiar. I checked my computer file of ‘rogue drivers’ and, not surprisingly, confirmed that the culprit was the same daredevil driver with whom I had recently travelled.
I reported the incident, and he was charged and fined for dangerous driving.
And if you think this behaviour is only reserved for young mini-bus operators, then you are wrong. And here we come to the Akila Jacobs scenario.
Akila was sitting in the front seat of mini-bus BJJ 305, driven by 60-year-old Terrence Tappin, when the vehicle slammed into the back of a moving truck near Well Road, Amelia’s Ward, in Linden.
Mini-bus front seat passengers usually take the full impact of a smash-up. And, unfortunately, this was the fate of Akila Jacobs.
I was writing the story about the mishap, which stated that driver Terrence Tappin was the only casualty, when I heard our Editor-in-Chief, Adam Harris, exclaim: “Akila is dead!?”
The initial reports about what had caused the crash were sketchy. Eventually, however, I spoke with a colleague who had travelled to Ituni in the ill-fated bus, but had opted to return in another vehicle.
According to my colleague, Mr. Tappin was speeding on the way to Ituni. The reporter claimed that some traffic ranks stepped onto the highway to stop him, but Mr. Tappin was going so fast that he did not see them.
Then I asked the million-dollar question:” Did anyone tell him to slow down?”
The answer I got left me to conclude that no one did. Not the GT&T staffers, not Akila in the front seat, not her fellow journalists.
So, now there is a question that is revolving in my mind: If someone had admonished Mr. Tappin about his reckless driving on the way up to Ituni, would that have made him drive in a sensible manner on the journey back?
Did silence kill Akila Jacobs?

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