Bus crushes bike rider in Belize City
It was a weekend of carnage on the nation’s highways with no less than four people dead in accidents involving motor vehicles. The most recent occurred today at around seven forty-five A.M. in Belize City. News 5’s Ann-Marie Williams arrived on the scene to find the victim’s body still lying in the street.
Ann-Marie Williams
When forty-eight year old Steven Bent, affectionately known as “Puppet,” left the Esso gas station on New Road this morning, who would have thought a few minutes later his life would have ended so tragically.
After pumping his tire, Bent rode his bicycle against traffic unto New Road. Upon reaching the corner with Victoria Street, he was knocked down by a seventy-seater Venus Bus as it crossed the junction with New Road. The bus was being driven at the time by Oscar Orellano of Orange Walk. Eyewitness Joseph Martinez says he saw the Venus bus coming in the long line of traffic.
Joseph Martinez, Eyewitness
“The bus came and eased down by the curve here, by New Road and from there the bus moved off again. Then I heard an impact, Bang! Like he hit a drum or something. I thought he probably hit another vehicle or something. The bus didn’t stop immediately because somebody had to run and holler at the bus. When I went out to see what’s wrong, I saw the body on the ground and the bicycle mashed up. I saw the boy with his face down and blood was beginning to trickle from his mouth already.”
Friends of Bent took time out to remember a community-spirited family man.
Friend #1
“He’s a good fellow. He always support the children and football, and ran little jokes.”
Friend #2
“He was always the type of person who’d be doing something positive. I remember him back in the days, he used to always be into young people, having a football team. He was always about taking care of other people and looking out for other people.”
Joseph Martinez
“He was a cool guy. He wasn’t in any mischief or anything like that. When you’d passed he’d say hello and run his little jokes.”
And what many on lookers thought was no joke was the length of time Bent’s corpse was left to lie on the street, not to mention the amount of rain the fell on him.
Joseph Martinez
“He got hit about 8:00 and they didn’t remove the body until after 9:00, that was before the rain came. The ambulance came first and because they check the body and he was dead already, they refused to remove the body, they had to wait for the police.”
Ann-Marie Williams for News 5.
Driver of the Venus bus, Oscar Orellano, has not been charged in connection with the knockdown as police say their preliminary investigations reveal that Orellano is not guilty of any wrong doing.
