Taxi driver dead in Boom Road crash

It is a brand new road as fine as any in the country…but that did not prevent the death of a Belize City man whose driving skills failed him on Saturday. News 5’s Jacqueline Woods spoke to the passenger who managed to survive.

Jacqueline Woods, Reporting

Doctors are cautiously optimistic that twenty-three year old Kafara Reid will recover from a severe back injury she received in Saturday afternoon’s traffic accident that killed her taxi driver friend, forty-one year old Wayne Ford. Reid says the car was on the Boom/Hattieville road heading towards the Western Highway, when Ford reached over to lower the volume on the radio and lost control of the vehicle. According to Reid, the vehicle first swerved to the right, breaking a pipe that was on the roadside.

Kafara Reid, Traffic Accident Victim

“I holler, Wayne look how you the drive, and he swerved over to the left and the same way he turned over to the left, he either missed the accelerator for the brakes and the vehicle overturned with we. I can’t recall how many times it turn over with we. I got flung out of the vehicle a distance from the vehicle, and the vehicle ended on top of he.”

Both Ford and Reid, who were not wearing seatbelts, were rushed to the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital, but Ford died on the way. Reid suffered severe spinal injuries and is expected to remain hospitalized for at least two weeks.

Kafara Reid

“I have a broken spine, and they had to take me for a surgery for the back. Then, they tell me to try and relax myself mostly on my back, because due to how I done get my spine broken.”

At the time of the accident, Ford was on his way back to the city after dropping off some passengers at Hattieville prison. Jacqueline Woods for News 5.

If Wayne Ford looks familiar to viewers, it is because he was featured in a story we ran last year on a group of taxi drivers who resisted attempts to have them removed from a makeshift stand outside the grounds of the K.H.M.H.