The nation's highways were cruel this weekend claiming four lives and leaving a couple more people fighting for theirs in hospitals.
The northern stretch was the deadliest claiming three lives. The first fatality was Saturday when a Chevy blazer flipped between miles 11 and 12 in Ladyville. The driver 32 year old Evelio Espinosa and a passenger 33 year old Brigidio Jimenez were violently flung from the vehicle and died. A second passenger Isaiah Samos survived.
Further north in Orange Walk Town, a Sunday night motorcycle ride had a deadly end. 18-year-old David Penner Jr. and 16-year-old Abram Braun left shipyard and hopped on a motorcycle enroute to Hill Bank around 7 last night. When he didn't come home, at around midnight Penner's dad found him semi-conscious state while Braun who was not wearing a helmet was killed on impact.
And in the third accident on the northern stretch, assistant to the Ombudsman Lionel Castillo survived a violent one-car accident early yesterday morning near Sandhill village. But one of his passengers David Matus is in the KHMH tonight in a semi-conscious state with a swollen brain. Around 1 am on Sunday, Castillo was driving his government issued Mitsubishi Montero from Orange Walk when he suffered a blowout. Matus was flung from the vehicle and sustained serious head injury. 3 other young men who were in the vehicle were not seriously injured.
The final death on the highway this weekend is probably the most heartbreaking as a 7 year old girl was knocked down and killed as he attempted to cross the highway near her home in Columbia Village (near Independence). Police say that around 6:30, Zoe Nezbitt was crossing the Southern highway when almost out of nowhere a Toyota Hilux knocked her down. Witnesses say the child tried to turn back but it was too late. That driver of the Hilux has been detained by police for, among other charges, driving with an expired permit.