No one but the patients of St Jude and the staff who were there to care for them on September 9, can give all the horrific details of what went down that fateful morning. Screams on the inside were masked as explosions and a blazing fire almost entirely consumed the surgical ward of St Jude hospital. It was impossible for anyone on the outside to feel the fear of the victims trapped inside.

Hours later, it was over. No more explosions, no more flames and no more smoke or frantic people trying their utmost to get patients to safety. The patients who’d been rescued had already been transported to the nearby Campus B or to other health care facilities and truckloads of equipment had already been transported out of St Jude hospital. The only thing that remained was anxiety and concern that could not be erased as family members impatiently awaited word from health officials on the status of their own.

“From the moment I heard it was the surgical ward, I just knew,” said Tazia St Aimee, a resident of Belle Vie, Vieux Fort. “I got cold, I knew something might have happened to him. He could not walk.”

The 20-year-old spoke of her seventeen-year-old cousin Jay Vigier, also known as Mernus, a student of the Vieux Fort Technical Secondary School. Jay was admitted to St Jude on August 9, exactly one month before the fire, after a vehicular accident left him unconscious. On the weekend of his accident, Jay had been driving through Vieux Fort town with his older brother when the van they were in lost control and crashed into a shoe store.

The teen’s family said he’d begun to regain consciousness two or three weeks after the accident.

“Things started going better,” said aunt Della St Aimee. “We could say we’d have our boy again. He would not talk to you, he couldn’t. He was just lying there but when you’d tell him to squeeze your hand, he’d do it. He’d hold you, look at you or move his eyes. One of the nurses told us he was starting to realize where he was.”

The STAR visited the St Aimee home in Belle Vue one day after the fire and the family could not be more accommodating. They were holding a wake at Jay’s grandmother’s house where friends and family had come together.

“One thing with the family, once something happens, everyone is there,” said Della. “I wish he was there for you to see him. If he was there and you were there, he would sit there and just smile.”

“Then he’d go behind one of us and say, sa ki famn sa la?” Tazia added breaking the somber mood for a moment as her cousins dissolved into laugher.

Jay’s mother wasn’t at home at the time but his cousins and sisters all wanted to speak out; they wanted the nation to know the pain they felt. To them Jay was not just another life lost; he was their brother. A creative, adventurous and ambitious young man who touched so many lives with his fun loving spirit and who loved carpentry.

“He was really good with his hands,” said Tazia. “He would just make anything for you in no time.”

“We’d go and catch opossums and we’d come back with eight or nine of them to sell or eat,” said Lebert, one of Jay’s cousins who said they were practically brothers.

“We liked to play cricket, we liked to go by the river and cook food, climb trees and cut off all the branches; we were doing bad things all around,” he laughed. “I miss him a lot.”

Jay’s older brother Sheldon Stephen says he wishes it had been him. His 20-year-old sister Christie said her 11-month old baby girl, Divine, still called his name.

“Jay was the first name she ever said,” Christie told the STAR. “He was my brother and I loved him, he loved me too.

“Every night I remember him,” she said her voice breaking. “Some times I wear his clothes. Whatever I wanted, he’d give it to me, and whatever he wanted, I’d give to him. I don’t know how it happened, if I was there . . . I don’t know.”

“You would love him if you met him,” his aunt said softly.

“I think if he hadn’t been restrained, God would have given him the strength to move,” said Tazia breaking the moment of silence. “He was a very strong boy.”

Jay was not the first family member they’d lost in a fire. Silka, a sister he’d never met died in a house fire at the age of seven.

Another of the St Jude fire victims was 87-year-old Joseph Jn Baptiste who’d fallen in a bathroom and broken his hipbone. One of Joseph’s relatives said he’d recovered well from surgery and was due home the day of the fire. Sixty-year-old Claudius Soudine died on the way to Victoria Hospital after suffering severe burns.

“I still feel it shouldn’t have happened,” said Jay’s brother Sheldon. “He was my little brother and I liked him a whole lot. How would anyone feel? That’s the same way I feel. He was recovering. Every time I went to the hospital, I would see him, watch him and I’d have to shed tears, so I started to go one day and one day . . . ”

On Thursday Jay’s school principal Pheodulas Eryste told the STAR students and teachers were having a hard time dealing with his death. District counselors had to be called to the school.

“Some teachers and students had to go home because they just couldn’t stay,” he said. “Jay was a remarkable athlete on the tracks and one of the best Agriculture students.”

On the day he got involved in the car accident, Jay’s school principal said plans were underway to get him a summer job at Coconut Bay where he’d get experience in the field he loved; gardening.

“Presently we have a shrine in his honour and we’re flying a black flag,” Eryste went on. “It’s a very trying time for his family but we tried to tell them in spite of everything, try to remember him for who he was. Jay was a pleasant boy, he did what he did and he did it right. He will be missed.”