The ruling Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) has lost a key organiser in St Ann in the run-up to local government elections, with the death of 32-year-old Mikel Thompson in Saturday's bus crash in Trelawny. 

Thompson was the party's deputy chairman of the Beecher Town division in St Ann and a key supporter of the expected JLP candidate for the local government election, Natalee Wilmott.

He was also a member of the JLP affiliate group Generation 2000. 

“I actually was in bed when I got a phone call from one of my supporters in the Rocky Hill community, that was about after six o'clock,” Wilmott told The Gleaner from the Montego Bay Convention Centre, in St James, where delegates of the JLP were meeting. 

Wilmott said she decided not to  speculate and called the hotel where Thompson was employed to enquire.  

"The person said to me, 'Are you sitting or are you standing?' I said to her, I'm already seated. And from there it was [just] mourning, you know," she said. 

Wilmott said Thompson worked with her mother who was JLP candidate for the Beecher Town division in the last local government election, and when her mother stepped down, she took up the position with Thompson staying on to help her. 

“He was very dedicated. Once you call him, he would make every effort to assist me on the road. He was a dedicated, hard-working individual," she said.

Thompson and another St Ann resident, 28-year-old Reace Anderson, of Lillyfield, Bamboo, died after the bus they were travelling in from Ocho Rios to work at the Excellence Oyster Bay hotel in Coopers Pen, Trelawny, crashed into a truck parked along the Braco main road.

More than eight people were injured in the accident.

- Carl Gilchrist

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