Claudine Housen, Staff Reporter
Onlookers gather at the scene of a four-vehicle collision involving a JUTA bus transporting nine tourists, including a baby, two police vehicles and a delivery truck, on Gloucester Avenue in Montego Bay, yesterday. - PHOTO BY MONIQUE HEPBURN
WESTERN BUREAU:
CHAOS REIGNED on Gloucester Avenue, popularly known as the 'Hip Strip' in Montego Bay, St. James, yesterday following a four-vehicle collision which left nine tourists, including a baby and an undetermined number of policemen, nursing injuries in hospital.
Reports are that about 2:45 p.m., a marked police jeep attempted to overtake a police radio car along the strip, when it collided with a JUTA Tours Toyota Hiace bus, sending it crashing into an Isuzu Elf truck.
When The Gleaner visited the scene, scores of bystanders, many irate, had gathered to view the mangled wreckage.
MOMENTS BEFORE THE ACCIDENT
Driver of the truck, Clarence Vernon described the moments leading up to the accident:
"I was in the truck coming up the street behind the tourist bus. The bus stopped, so we stopped behind it," said Mr. Vernon. "The bus driver saw the police jeep coming down the middle of the road without any siren. Then the siren came on as the jeep was trying to overtake the radio car in front of it. He came too close to the radio car and swerved away from it and crashed into the JUTA bus. That was when the bus crashed into me."
According to eyewitness Natalie Davey, the accident was due to police negligence. She said that the vehicles were speeding and that the driver of the police jeep did not use the siren to alert other motorists upon overtaking the radio car.
Ms. Davey also lamented what she claimed was the poor treatment of the nine tourists who were travelling in the JUTA Tours bus.
At press time the condition of the injured was not known, as investigations were still under way.
