| One year after surviving a horrific crash that claimed the lives of two of his friends, 20-year-old Jermaine Rodrigues still has severe headaches, suffers from some memory loss, and has developed a speech impediment.His mother, however, says that the youth has received no compensation from the company with which he was subcontracted, despite several promises officials had made to them.Rodrigues’s life went horribly awry on the night of May 4, 2007 when a pickup in which he and five others were travelling slammed into a parked sand truck near Yarrowkabra, on the Soesdyke/Linden Highway.The top of the pickup was ripped clean off on impact. The driver, Avinash Lall,NFL Jerseys China Wholesale, and passenger, Steve McKenzie, were killed almost instantly.Jermaine Rodrigues, Troy Scott, Dexter Daniels and Darnelle Bobb, a Trinidadian, were injured.The men were all employed by Calatel, a firm that was sub-contracted to Digicel.Rodrigues sustained head injuries, and spent a week in the Georgetown Public Hospital’s High Dependency Unit (HDU) before being discharged.But his mother, Vesta Rodrigues, said that she immediately realized that her son’s recovery was far from complete.“He was not speaking clearly, he had severe headaches, and he was forgetting things,” she said.Her son is now unemployed, and according to Mrs. Rodrigues, Calatel, the firm with which her son was employed, is no longer in Guyana.And she said that promises by some Digicel officials to compensate her son have not materialized. “They promised that they would look after his (medical) bills. Two of them (officials) came to my house and promised faithfully that they would compensate him.” She alleged that, apart for paying for her son’s CT scan, there has been no other medical assistance.Mrs. Rodrigues says that her son still shows the effects from his ordeal.At present, she is preparing to have him undergo speech therapy, and hopes that the company to which he was sub-contracted will find some form of employment for him. |
