News that a woman had been run over by a truck on Friday, March 18 spread like wildfire. The weekend had hardly begun yet tragedy had already struck for the family of 33-year-old Natasha Breen.
Natasha, also known as Cheryl left work later than usual on Friday. She’d been making her way home from her workplace in the Rodney Bay Mall just after 8pm. She got as far as Choc, and proceeded to cross the road leading to her bus stop. Once there she would wait for transportation to get to her home in Paix Bouche, Babonneau. She’d never make it there.
Eyewitnesses say Natasha was walking across the pedestrian crossing, and was about to step onto the sidewalk when a truck barreled into her. One eyewitness reports trying to get the attention of the truck driver by flagging him down. The attempt was in vain.
According to police reports, the truck was being driven by a Babonneau man who’d been traveling toward Balata. Natasha was pronounced dead on the scene and the driver taken into police custody.
Natasha’s sister Kurina Joseph says she was just about to leave her house at minutes to nine on Friday when she got the most dreaded phone call. The voice on the other line belonged to one of her other sisters who told her not to panic. She’d heard Natasha had been in an accident, but hadn’t pulled through.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Joseph said. “I was trying to call everyone, even a police friend of mine to find out what was going on. Finally I decided to take a bus and head to the accident scene. My boyfriend and I went but still couldn’t get any information. The police didn’t know who she was and the body was already covered. They wouldn’t let us through.”
Loud anguished screams caught the attention of everyone on the scene, and Joseph soon realized one of her sisters was already there. The screams and her sister’s presence confirmed everything she’d been questioning.
Joseph and her boyfriend left Choc to meet other family members in Castries, and when they finally made their way back to the accident scene through the thick traffic about an hour later, Natasha’s body still hadn’t been moved. A doctor was needed to pronounce her dead.
Natasha leaves behind a six-year-old daughter, Cherissa who the family says is much too young to fully understand the situation.
“She knows something is wrong. She knows something has happened to her mother but I don’t think she understands death because she’s already asked if her mother is going to be back in November,” Joseph said. “Her mother recently finished building a house and since it’s happened the child refuses to go into the house.”
“For the first time, the entire family is together,” Joseph said. “She wanted that to happen with her house warming, and look at how it’s happened, because of her, in a cold kind of way.”
Joseph described her sister as “the quiet one” who’d laugh at everything, who was more on the reserved side.
“Her daughter was her life,” Joseph expressed. “Everyday after work she’d bring something for her child. Even on Friday she had bananas she was bringing for Cherissa. We found the bananas, some stuck to the bumper of the truck. She had just entered a new relationship. She was very happy with him. Everyone is extremely saddened by it, especially because Cheryl was the most cautious person we knew.”
“A couple years ago, she was on the bus stop in Rodney Bay, she’d just gotten off from work and they were doing some work on the road and a blade from one of the tools the guys were using flew and cut her arm, I think the tool went bad, and she was cut badly, a very deep cut and everyone was saying if it had taken her somewhere else she would have died. It was very scary then that it happened to her, now this.”
The truck driver involved in the accident was at press time still in police custody.
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