Boat crash survivor recalls seeing a ‘child’ driving other vessel

JENSEN LA VENDE

Se­nior Re­porter

[email protected]

One of the sur­vivors of last week­end’s dead­ly boat­ing col­li­sion off the Ch­aguara­mas coast says he re­calls see­ing a child op­er­at­ing the ves­sel that crashed in­to the one he was in, lead­ing to the death of one of six peo­ple who went miss­ing at sea.

Speak­ing with the me­dia at the Chaqua­ca­bana Re­sort in Ch­aguara­mas yes­ter­day, Ma­lik Rud­der said he was among a group of five, head­ing to a Down the Is­lands par­ty when tragedy struck.

Po­lice re­port­ed that around 6.30 pm on Sun­day, a 44-year-old man from Fed­er­a­tion Park was cap­tain­ing a ves­sel named BAM­BA­LEO, a 28-foot Bowen Plea­sure Craft east near Can­nings Point, when there was a col­li­sion with a 29-foot Chantelle named BEL­BA­GAI, which was head­ing west, cap­tained by a 35-year-old Point Cumana man.

Po­lice ini­tial­ly said five peo­ple were thrown over­board. How­ev­er, a sixth man, iden­ti­fied as Ja­heem Richards, was lat­er con­firmed to have been among those miss­ing. Nine oth­ers aboard BEL­BA­GAI were tak­en for med­ical at­ten­tion. All 17 pas­sen­gers aboard the BAM­BA­LEO were re­leased af­ter they were re­viewed for pos­si­ble in­juries.

Speak­ing at a me­dia brief­ing on Wednes­day, for­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi, who is rep­re­sent­ing the in­ter­est of the BAM­BA­LEO’s cap­tain, de­nied so­cial me­dia re­ports that a child was in charge of the boat at the time of the in­ci­dent.

“There is ab­solute­ly no truth, let me re­peat this, ab­solute­ly no truth to the in­volve­ment of any mi­nor con­duct­ing any boat. That is just com­plete­ly un­true,” Al-Rawi said.

Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Rud­der said: “When I raised up, I got a glimpse, glimpse of a lit­tle short per­son like a child dri­ving the oth­er boat, com­ing in­to us and I end up sit­ting back down now. So, when I sit back down, the same time, the boat rammed in­to us and I black­out for a lit­tle bit and that is all I can re­mem­ber. Every­one who was with me, I nev­er see them again.”

Rud­der said while there were life jack­ets for those in BEL­BA­GAI, not every­one had them on.

He said all he could re­call af­ter the crash was oth­ers shout­ing fran­ti­cal­ly.

“I end up in the wa­ter and I kind of get lash and with the im­pact, I kind of fell un­con­scious a lit­tle bit and I came back up. When I came back up, a boat dri­ve over us, must be the same boat that hit us. And then some­body from the boat pull me out from the wa­ter.”

Af­ter be­ing pulled out of the wa­ter, he re­called see­ing two oth­ers, one with a gash to the head and an­oth­er man, be­fore those who were res­cued were tak­en to Staubles Bay for med­ical at­ten­tion.

Rud­der, who had a neck brace on, said he has to un­der­go fur­ther med­ical tests, in­clud­ing an MRI, to en­sure he had not sus­tained any oth­er in­juries.

“It’s very trau­ma­tis­ing. I could hard­ly even sleep. It’s trau­ma­tis­ing. Every time I close my eyes, I see it. My neck in pain, my back in pain. I could hard­ly eat,” he said.