Updated | RIVER HERO

When Marshall Whyte, a farmer in Chapelton, Clarendon, heard screams for help coming from the nearby Thomas River Friday, he instinctively sprang from his house and ran towards the cry of distress.

His lightning-fast reaction led to him jumping into the river to save three children, including an infant.

The shrieks to which he responded were from a seated visually impaired woman whose granddaughter, Brihania Sindale, an 11-year-old student of Dupont Primary School in St Andrew, and 34-year-old Remo Douglas, a warehouse operator visiting from the United Kingdom, eventually drowned.

Whyte had gone home for his lunch break from the fields to watch the midday news and the television drama series 'Generations' when he heard “someone bawlin for help”.

“When mi run go down deh, mi jump off inna di water. After mi jump off inna di water, mi see di girl a dip, a go down and a come up, so mi take her out and put her outa di dry land and she start point say somebody lef' into the water,” Whyte said in a Gleaner interview Sunday.

“So when mi look, mi see a little girl, so mi take out the little girl. Then mi see di baby a float away, so mi take him out and carry him back up. By di time mi carry him back up on di sand, dem tell mi say two more smaddy down underneath the water,” he added sombrely of the bittersweet intervention.

But too weakened by the prior rescue efforts, Whyte bolted back to his house and phoned his common-law wife, Alesha Martin, who was doing day's work metres away.

She helped Whyte to rally residents to come to the aid of the duo, but that help came too late.

“He got nervous and couldn't save the other two. When we come, dem sink already. Di water full up inna dem belly and sink dem,” Martin told The Gleaner.

“Recently, the river come down, so the bottom soft like sand, so you have to swim out … . A 20 years me live yaso, and mi never see nobody down there so, but mi see one cow sink one day when me a wash,” she said.

Martin is happy that Whyte managed to save three persons, saying that the loss of five lives would have been as sorrowful as the Cocoa Piece murder of 31-year-old Kemisha Wright and her four children on June 21.

Whyte had previously witnessed a drowning.

Some residents referenced the community's haunting superstition of how “di river nuh love stranger”.

Others from the farming district described the deaths as unfortunate, lamenting that only community folk would have known how to navigate around the dangerous depths of the river.

Ivan Thomas, a 50-year-old resident, is also mournful that the tragedy unfolded on a day and time when many persons were at work.

“It's a sad thing go on. It's an unfortunate day when nobody nuh de home. Only one man hear di screaming and see dem inna di water,” Thomas said.

Other young persons who were washing their clothes in the river on Sunday said the incident has filled them with new fear.

“Right now mi woulda chuck off, but the fear inna me. Di river nuh love stranger, so it take dem because dem a stranger. From me a youth, mi see man come deh and dead when dem a swim,” one resident said.

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story said that Brihania Sindale was the daughter of the visually impaired woman at the riverside. Brihania was her granddaughter.

ainsworth.morris@gleanerjm.com