Driver charged in Unitedville hit and run accident
Fifty-four-year-old Roland Garcia was arraigned in the San Ignacio Magistrates Court earlier today, following a hit and run accident over the weekend which claimed the life of a Unitedville resident. On Friday night, San Ignacio police were summoned to the scene of a fatal road traffic accident near Mount Hope on the George Price Highway. There they observed the lifeless body of thirty-seven-year-old Alfonso Mendoza. A short distance away, his beach cruiser bicycle was found with damages to its rear wheel. According to Superintendent Richard Rosado, the men had been socializing at an establishment in the nearby village of Blackman Eddy when Mendoza got on his bicycle and headed towards home. Moments later, Garcia headed in the same direction and collided with the cyclist who received massive head and body injuries.
Superintendent Richard Rosado, O.C., San Ignacio Police
Supt. Richard Rosado
“On Friday, October seventh, 2016 at about ten p.m., acting on information received of a traffic accident in the vicinity of Mount Hope, Unitedville Village, Cayo District, San Ignacio police visited the said location whereupon arrival a male person of East Indian descent was seen lying motionless in a face-up position. A few feet from the body was a beach cruiser bicycle. The scene was processed and the body was transported to the San Ignacio Community Morgue where it awaits a post mortem. Initial investigation revealed that Alfonso Mendoza, thirty-seven-years-old Belizean laborer of a Unitedville address, was riding a beach cruiser bicycle on the George Price Highway when upon approaching Mount Hope Church a pickup truck traveling in the same direction collided into the rear portion of the bicycle, causing Mendoza to fall off the bicycle where he sustained the fatal injuries. As a result, Rolando Garcia, fifty-four-years-old, a Belizean laborer of Unitedville Village was arrested and charged for manslaughter by negligence, causing death by careless conduct, drove motor vehicle without due care and attention and failed to report an accident.”
Isani Cayetano
“Insofar as your preliminary or ongoing investigation, is there any reason to believe that the driver of the vehicle may have been under the influence of alcohol?”
Supt. Richard Rosado
“Well based on the evidential material we have gathered we do know that the driver and the deceased were at a club in Blackman Eddy Village and they departed a few minutes behind each other from the nightclub.”
