Karen Sudu, Gleaner Writer

BOG WALK, St Catherine:

They have never lived apart, now Nekeisha Watt is trying to fathom how she will spend the rest of her life without her younger brother, Kemar Watt.

Kemar, 25, was one of three men who drowned in the Rio Cobre Wednesday night after a trailer driven by Michael Nicholas, transporting products for Jamaica Broilers from Content Agricultural Products Limited in Bog Walk to Spring Village, careened off Flat Bridge and plunged into the river. Nicholas' son Travis was the other victim.

For his sister, Kemar, a past student of Old Harbour High School, was more than a brother.

"He was my best friend. We lived loving; we were close. If I was at home and he was on the road, I could call him and say, 'Brother, get this for me'," she reflected after she and Margaret Simpson, their mother's sister, identified Kemar's body at Robert's Funeral Home in Commodore on Thursday morning.

But Watt, who told The Gleaner that their mother lived overseas and gunmen snuffed out their father's life seven years ago, said she was still unsure why her sibling, who had a passion for driving, was on the trailer.

"Last week Friday, he kept a round robin and Sunday morning he said he wasn't going to work for the rest of the week, he was gonna enjoy the money. And I don't know what happened. He went to work and later Wednesday night I got a call that he had drowned," a teary-eyed Watt recollected.

Though she was still in shock, Simpson was able to describe her nephew, who she raised.

"Kemar was a loving person, jovial, full of jokes. He was my best nephew. He was just a loving person who was loved by everybody," she said.

The relatives and friends of 45-year-old Nicholas and 18-year-old Travis, affectionately called Tevin, were no less traumatised by the tragedy.

"He was a very nice person, somebody you could deal with; very unique," Keisha Stewart, Travis' cousin, said of his father, also a mechanic in Church Pen, Old Harbour, where they lived.

Last conversation

She painfully reflected on their last conversation at his home.

"I saw him on Tuesday evening around 4 o'clock. We spoke about the trailer he was working on. He was trying to finish it up so he could give it to the owner and I told him to get some rest when he was finished and he said, 'Okay'," she said.

Stewart said for her aunt Icylyn, Nicholas' wife who suffers from hypertension, the loss of her husband and son was too much to bear.

"After she heard the news, she collapsed. We took her to the hospital and the doctor made some checks and after that we took her home," Stewart explained.

In the meantime, Jamaica Broilers Group issued a statement clarifying that the dead men were not employed to the group, as had been reported earlier in the day. Instead, they were employees of one of the group's service providers contracted to transport products.

Notwithstanding, the group expressed condolences to the families of the deceased, as well as the family of the sole survivor of the accident, known as 'Belly Rat' of Spring Village in St Catherine.

rural@gleanerjm.com