Observer vendor Desreane Irving had planned to spend another month selling newspapers in Half-Way-Tree before going off on maternity leave. At least, that was what she told her sister, Janet Ffrench, a few weeks ago when Ffrench advised her to rest.

“Is just the other day me tell her to take some rest for the baby and she tell me not yet, she will wait until August when she near to have baby,” a distraught Ffrench told the Observer outside the St Andrew Parish Church where Irving and three other women were mowed down by a garbage truck yesterday morning. “Now she gone leave the whole of her children them.”

Forty-year-old Irving, the mother of five children, was five months pregnant. She died on the spot. The other women – Allison Burke, 46; Effana Swaby, 25; and Tamara Simpson, 19 – who the police say live in Portmore, St Catherine, were admitted to the Kingston Public Hospital in serious condition.

Police said the tragedy occurred shortly after 7:00 am when the driver of the blue and white truck belonging to Domestic and Environmental Cleaning Solutions, lost control of the vehicle which hit a motor car before slamming into the women who were on the sidewalk near the intersection of Hagley Park Road and Maxfield Avenue, one of the capital’s most heavily traversed intersections.

The police also said that the car hit by the truck ran into another car at the traffic light.

The driver of the truck fled the scene, but his assistant, who was also in the vehicle at the time of the incident, was questioned at the Half-Way-Tree Police Station.

According to Inspector Haughton Newel of the Police Traffic Department, the driver may have been distracted by a conversation between himself and his assistant.

“It appears he was talking to the other driver and did not realise that he was coming up on the vehicles at the stop light so fast. That is when he hit one of the two cars and swerved onto the sidewalk where he ran over the newspaper vendor before hitting the other women,” Newel told the Observer, adding that the assistant was interviewed by the police in the presence of his lawyer yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday, as hundreds of curious onlookers gathered at the scene of the accident, Irving’s relatives and several newspaper vendors wept openly at the sight of her crushed remains.

The tragedy was too much for her older sister, Jennifer Grizzle, to bear. The grief-stricken woman collapsed and had to be rushed to hospital as undertakers started to remove her sister’s body.

Irving’s 20-year-old daughter, Shackesha Wilson, who was quick on the scene with her aunt, Janet Ffrench, shook uncontrollably as the reality of her mother’s death hit home.

Later, during a visit to the Observer, Wilson said that she was sleeping at the time when a friend called and informed her of the tragic incident.

She reflected on the good relationship she had with her mother and was obviously saddened by the fact that she would no longer enjoy that bond.

Michael Broomfield, who sold newspapers at the same spot with Irving for years, described her as a leader who never deserved to die so tragically.

“Me just hear the big noise and me look around and only see the bib on the ground, that is when me start see the blood and everything and really see what happened. Desreane never should have died like this; she was too good. Is a really wicked death she get, trust me,” Broomfield cried before collapsing in the arms of two other grieving vendors.

A bloodied stack of newspapers, a single shoe and the sound of the truck’s throttling engine metres away from the death spot served as a chilling reminder of the accident.

Irving, who lived at Maxfield Avenue in St Andrew, had been an Observer vendor for more than 12 years.

“She was always loyal to the Observer, always thinking highly of the company and a mother hen to the street youths along Maxfield Avenue and all the other vendors with whom she worked,” said Thaddeus Kirkland, Observer field officer.

Yesterday, Observer CEO Ed Khoury expressed sorrow at Irving’s tragic death and extended condolences to her family and friends.