Double tragedy - Brother and teenage sister die in motor vehicle mishap

A St Catherine family is mourning the loss of two members after a motor vehicle accident left a brother and sister dead.

They have been identified as 15-year-old Chevelle Ashly Lewis and her 24-year-old brother Germaine Lewis, an information technology technician.

Reports are that about 5:15 yesterday morning Chevelle was a passenger in a Nissan Tiida being driven by her brother along Brunswick Avenue in Spanish Town, St Catherine.

According to the reports, Germaine had left the family's Eltham Acres house to drive another sister to work and Chevelle decided to accompany him.

Slammed into a house

On their back home, Germaine lost control of the vehicle, which slammed into a house less that five minutes away from his destination.

"The words 'airborne' and 'cascade' are mild terms to what happened here this morning. It is a miracle there weren't more fatalities," Constable Neil Grant of the Police Traffic Department told The Sunday Gleaner.

An occupant of the house, Rudy McKenzie, agreed that only a miracle could account for why others were not killed in what he described as "a close encounter".

"I came home about 4 o'clock this morning and fell asleep and was awakened by a loud bang. When I looked, the front of the car was inside the house. I noticed that they took a female from the vehicle with multiple injuries to her head," said McKenzie.

Persons who converged on the scene were also in shock as they looked at the mangled motor car and the damage to the building.

"This look like it was flying as it ripped down the gate column, the palm tree and still smashed into the house," said one bystander as she pointed to a smashed concrete column, the palm tree which was split into small pieces, and several branches from a breadfruit tree and a mango tree which littered the area.

The St Catherine North Police Division has now recorded 10 fatalities from eight motor

vehicle accidents since the start of the year.

Yesterday's accident came less than 24 hours after 35-year-old Oliver Forde and 59-year-old Phoebe Williamson Daley lost their lives in a two-vehicle collision in Trelawny, and moved the number of people to die on the nation's streets since the start of this year to 123.