CORRIVERTON, BERBICE – Sixteen-year-old Jodea Seline woke up on Friday morning filled with excitement. She had been looking forward to her school’s sports event in Corriverton, and her mother, Shemmala Castello, proudly dropped her off at Central Corentyne Secondary School, watching her daughter and 13-year-old sister Jennia head off with bright smiles and boundless energy.
But by the time the sun began to set, Castello’s world was ripped apart. Around 18:30 hrs, the phone rang with the kind of call that stops a parent’s heart. ‘There has been an accident. Your daughter is involved’. Castello raced to the Number 75 Hospital, desperate for answers, praying for a miracle. Instead, she walked straight into a nightmare. Her daughter was gone.
“Her brains were coming through her ears…” she cried, her voice breaking as she recalled the moment that shattered her. Overcome with grief, she collapsed and had to be admitted for treatment herself. Students who survived recounted the horrifying sequence of events. “Sir pulled on a horse,” they told her. One swerve to avoid an animal. One violent crash. One minibus full of children overturned in seconds.
Nothing could undo the devastation that followed. Those who knew Jodea describe her as “friendly to everyone,” a gentle, radiant presence who made friends effortlessly. Now her home is silent, heavy with grief, no laughter, no footsteps, only the unbearable stillness of absence.
Jennia, her younger sister, remains hospitalised. Castello clings to hope for her recovery even as she tries to comprehend the loss of her eldest child. “I just hope the other children recover safely… and my daughter too,” she whispered, her voice trembling under the weight of unimaginable pain.
The tragedy deepened hours later. 31-year-old teacher Jerome Bernard, the minibus driver who tried to avoid the horse, succumbed to his injuries at the Georgetown Public Hospital. He became the second fatality in a crash that left 17 others injured, turning what began as a simple school outing into a scene of horror. Two lives gone. Families broken. A community left grieving and asking how a day meant for joy became one of Corentyne’s most heartbreaking tragedies in recent memory.
