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After more than a decade … Mother still to receive civil award for children killed in accident
For the past decade Lucille Bacchus, has been back and forth to the courts trying to get secure a $15 million civil suit award for the death of her two children.
Dead: Wallie Bacchus and Fareena Bacchus
The award came as a result of civil suit filed against a drunken driver who had killed her two teenage children, Wallie and Fareena Bacchus, along the East Coast Demerara road.
The incident occurred on November 16, 1996, – some 20 years. Mrs. Bacchus is constantly reminded of the pain of losing her children. This is due to a number of reasons, the most pressing being the fact that her children’s killer was able to evade the course of justice for the most part.
According to Mrs. Bacchus, Nandram Narine, the driver of the vehicle only spent 18 months of a three-year prison sentence that was imposed by the court. In addition, the driver has been basically ignoring a Court order to pay her some $15M following a wrongful death lawsuit.
The criminal case took three years and the civil suit took seven years and six months, Mrs. Bacchus recalls.
I am trying to put this thing behind me but this guy (the driver) is ignoring the order. I have been running to the court for years trying to get an end to this matter. The last thing I heard is that he was hiding out somewhere in Lethem and that he wanted to pay me $25,000, a month. I don’t think that is fair and I would be able to adequately benefit from it.
I just want to put this part behind me because I could never forget my children; they were my world.
Bacchus says what is worst is the fact that almost every time she opens the newspaper, she reads about the death of someone on the country’s roadway, and, too often, that victim died under the wheels of a drunk driver’s car.
“I had stopped reading the newspaper for that reason.” My children were 17 and 16 at the time they were killed by a drunk driver. They would have been 37 and 36 now and would have had children of their own.
On November 16, 1996, Wallie Bacchus’s life ended at the age of 17, while 10 days later his 16-year-old sister, Fareena Bacchus, succumbed to her injuries.
Recalling the events of that fateful day, Mrs. Bacchus said her children had gone to a friend’s residence in Enmore, East Coast Demerara, to collect a book.
They were returning to their Lusignan home, when the driver of a speeding car overtook a parked vehicle and sideswiped two persons on a motorcycle, before hitting the siblings. Wallie and Fareena were also on a motorcycle.
Mrs. Bacchus explained that at the time of the accident, which occurred at approximately 08:40 hours, she had just closed the family shop and was about to relax when a neighbour approached her and asked about the whereabouts of her children.
She responded that they would return shortly.
“If someone had told me that my children would not return home, I would have never let them out of the house,” the emotional mom said, as she removed her spectacles to wipe away tears.
Wallie, she recalled, was fully conscious when she visited him at the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the Georgetown Public Hospital, and had even recounted the entire tragedy for his mother.
Lucille Bacchus
He shocked everyone when he succumbed at around 14:30 hrs the same day. According to the post mortem report, the teenager died of multiple internal injuries, which included a broken pelvis, damaged liver and spleen and severed intestines.
Lucille Bacchus still clung to hope that maybe she would still be able to take home Fareena, who had been unconscious from the time she was thrown from the motorcycle.
But this was not to be. Fareena died from kidney failure on November 26, 1996—two days after undergoing brain surgery in Trinidad.
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