Man dies in sugar truck crash

A truck is said to have been “packed” with sugar when it smashed into a wall and another vehicle, resulting in the death of the driver on Wednesday, September 28.
The box truck was transporting the commodity from Kingstown to Peruvian Vale when it reportedly experienced brake failure while travelling down Casson Hill at around 1:00 p.m on Wednesday, September 28.

It careened off the road and smashed into the Adams Building in Arnos Vale.

The remains of the sugar laden box truck in which driver Suraj ‘Sarge’ Bacchus lost his life when it crashed into a rental vehicle and Adams Building at Arnos Vale.

The driver Suraj ‘Sarge’ Bacchus received extensive injuries from the collision, as the front of the vehicle on his side was disintegrated on impact by the concrete wall and steps. Bacchus was removed from the wreck where he is said to have been pinned, and then taken to hospital. Bacchus, who was an integral part of his family’s wholesale business at Peruvian Vale, did not survive, succumbing to his injuries.

Two other occupants were said to have been in the front of the vehicle and appeared to be unharmed.

The renter of vehicle RK114 had parked near the steps leading up to “The Original Rik’s” in Arnos Vale, before going to order a pizza at the establishment, and was lucky not to have been in his vehicle at the time of the collision.

Kevin Castello, a Vincentian who has been visiting from England for a few weeks, was waiting on the pizza that he ordered for his mother.

KEVIN CASTELLO – renter of the parked vehicle that the truck smashed into.

“I was just gonna get up to come outside because I was fed up of sitting down in there because I was waiting for the pizza for a while,” he revealed.

He explained that he was standing by the glass door of the restaurant, when he saw the vehicle “go straight into the wall.”

“It was scary,” Castello described. “I’ve been in accidents before but this one was scary,” he said, “I could have been standing up there and it took out the whole steps. I (would have) ended up underneath the vehicle.”

He recalled that “when (the restaurateur) opened the pizza she said ‘put back in the pizza for a little bit’, otherwise I would have been downstairs then, or started the vehicle to move out.”

“I would have been in the full impact.”

Asked what happened in the aftermath of the accident, the witness recalled that persons were trying to help Bacchus whose father died less than a year ago.

“…The whole front of the truck was on top the wall itself so he was pinned in by that wall,” Castello recalled.

He contemplated that if the rental vehicle wasn’t there the entire front of the vehicle would

have gone into the building, and the other two occupants in the front would have been fatally wounded.

After the crash people were apparently looking for ropes and chains to pull the truck away. However, the chain kept “snapping”.

They had to take the sugar out of the vehicle, Castello explained, because it was “packed” with the commodity, and “full of weight”.