Accident Victim Gudiela Estevez Succumbs 2 Weeks Later

Gudiela Estevez

Now to a traffic fatality…eighty-seven-year-old Gudiela Estevez passed away this morning, exactly two weeks after she and her grandson, eight-year-old Nikolai Tun, were knocked down at the corner of King Street and Amara Avenue in Belize City. Estevez was taking her grandson to Saint Ignatius Primary School on February twenty-second when they were hit by a pickup truck, driven by forty-nine-year old Martin Franklin Reyes.  They were both taken to the K.H.M.H. where they were treated and released the same day.  According to Sonia Tun, the incident left her mother bed-ridden and in pain.  This morning, just before three o’clock, she passed away at her house. While a post-mortem is scheduled for Thursday to determine the cause of death, Sonia believes that Estevez died as a result of the accident.

Sonia Tun

Sonia Tun, Daughter of Deceased

“She was always complaining about her hip giving her a lot of pain. She came home; she was released the same day. She was eating and everything, but she was still in a lot of pain. But it is weird because last night she got up at two-thirty and everything seemed normal and then she asked me to sit up cause she wanted some water. And I gave her some water and she said she only wanted a little bit and so I gave her only one tablespoon of water and that is what she drank. And then she said she wanted to lie down and when I made her lay down, she started breathing heavily, like panting. And I said she didn’t look good and so I called my niece, cause my niece said she was acting funny during the day. And then we decided to call BERT and by the time I went upstairs to put on a pants so that I could go with her, my niece said, “I think she died; I think Mamita died.” When I came down, she had in fact died. And I am on the phone with BERT and I am giving her CPR and she didn’t respond at all. I can definitely tell you that…she didn’t have any ailments other than small joint pains that old people have but she didn’t have anything other than that. She used to walk every day to drop my son to school and she did it because she wanted to. That was her form of exercise. She used to walk from here all the way to complex to go see one of her friends. So I really do believe that it was because of the accident that that deteriorated her life. She couldn’t stand up, she hated being immobile. She comes from the generation of modesty where she could get up and cook to someone having to clean her and bathe her and she didn’t like it.”