FAMILY’S HOPES DASHED

sto­ries by JENSEN LA VENDE

Se­nior Re­porter

[email protected]

Af­ter near­ly four days miss­ing at sea, Anil Ahy­ee’s body was found, bring­ing re­lief and clo­sure to his fam­i­ly.

For his moth­er, Eliz­a­beth Ahy­ee, the dis­cov­ery of her son’s body brought an added com­fort, as this was the sec­ond son she had lost to the sea. The first was Ralph Ahy­ee some 17 years ago. He dis­ap­peared af­ter he went on a fish­ing trip.

Speak­ing with the me­dia near the Chaqua­ca­bana Re­sort in Ch­aguara­mas yes­ter­day, af­ter con­firm­ing the body found was that of her 38-year-old son, Ahy­ee thanked God for grant­i­ng her some mea­sure of peace.

“I am very pleased that I got my child’s body and I am pray­ing for the oth­ers that they re­ceive theirs be­cause as a par­ent, I want­ed clo­sure and thank God I got it. So, to every­body in Trinidad and To­ba­go, thanks for the sup­port and prayers. Every­body, be strong.”

Ahy­ee de­scribed her son as “the life of the par­ty.” She said her prayers were an­swered to have re­trieved her son’s body.

The san­i­ta­tion work­er was one of six peo­ple re­port­ed miss­ing af­ter the ves­sel they were in col­lid­ed with an­oth­er ves­sel off the Ch­aguara­mas coast around 6.30 pm on Sun­day night. The five oth­ers miss­ing are Kieyan­na Seechan, 17, Amyir Ali, 18, Ja­heem Richards, 23, Loren­zo Oliv­er, 35, and Ti­tus Au­gus­tine, 25.

Mau­rice Brown, Richards’ step­fa­ther, yes­ter­day said the fam­i­ly on­ly be­came aware he was on the ves­sel on Tues­day, af­ter he failed to come home. He said while Richards was a strong swim­mer, he is doubt­ful he would be found alive, but the fam­i­ly re­mained hope­ful.

“I’m not re­as­sured that he will be alive but I’m just keep­ing the hopes up that they might find him some­where on some is­land, hide up some­where. But ba­si­cal­ly, from what I’m see­ing with the days that gone by, I’m not rul­ing out that he’s dead. I know for a fact that af­ter those long days, noth­ing can be done.”

He added that his step­son was a great cook.

“ He liked to cook, you know and just hav­ing a good time, that’s the best I can say, just hav­ing a good time. He is a cur­ry man. He loves his cur­ry. We were hop­ing that he would have come (and cook for Di­vali) but no, he went and lime, which we didn’t know any­thing about.”

Brown said De­fence Min­is­ter Wayne Sturge spoke with the fam­i­ly mem­bers and as­sured that all was be­ing done to re­trieve the bod­ies of those still miss­ing.

In a post on Face­book, the min­istry post­ed a pic­ture of Sturge meet­ing with the fam­i­ly at Staubles Bay, where Coast Guard of­fi­cials in­formed fam­i­ly mem­bers that the search and res­cue ef­fort was not a re­cov­ery op­er­a­tion.

“The meet­ing pro­vid­ed an op­por­tu­ni­ty to en­gage di­rect­ly with the fam­i­lies, hear their con­cerns and of­fer sup­port dur­ing this dif­fi­cult time. The Min­istry of De­fence re­mains com­mit­ted to work­ing with the rel­e­vant agen­cies as ef­forts con­tin­ue in re­la­tion to the five per­sons who re­main miss­ing,” the post stat­ed.

Mean­while, Ch­aguara­mas/Point Cumana coun­cil­lor Kevon Williams called on res­i­dents to re­frain from mak­ing claims on so­cial me­dia that can­not be sub­stan­ti­at­ed, which in­clud­ed that a child was op­er­at­ing the boat that col­lid­ed with the one the miss­ing peo­ple were on at the time of the ac­ci­dent. He in­stead called on them to ral­ly around the rel­a­tives of those af­fect­ed.

He said de­spite the re­cov­ery of Ahy­ee’s body, there is still pain the com­mu­ni­ty is feel­ing and that must be al­lowed to be re­leased safe­ly.

“The mood is a mix of emo­tions and that is most­ly anger. Anger in the sense of what peo­ple have in their minds, which I don’t want to go in­to fur­ther de­tails, but we’ve seen peo­ple in terms of some per­sons, we have met them cry­ing when they try to ex­plain them­selves and so on. A lot of peo­ple are feel­ing a sense of hurt and de­pres­sion I would say at this time ... based on the cir­cum­stances of los­ing so many of our com­mu­ni­ty jew­els that are un­ac­count­ed for, yet, our faith is alive. It is rich. We trust God and we stand on his promis­es.”

Williams said plans for a week­end vig­il near the sea were dashed af­ter Ahy­ee’s body was found.

“To the fam­i­lies, give them that space to grieve at this time and hope and trust God for the ones that are still un­ac­count­ed for. We’re still go­ing right down, ac­ti­vat­ing our faith. I al­so want to say a Her­culean thank you, thank you to the Hunters’ Search and Res­cue team. I want to thank all the oth­er search teams, all the oth­er agen­cies.”