LIFE has always been hard for Leon ‘Chung’ Palmer. But on Friday, December 19 it became utterly unbearable for the 45-year-old Portland farmer.

A little after 8:00 pm a truck transporting 20 vendors to the Coronation market in Kingston plunged off the winding road into a gully at Dam Bridge in the parish, claiming the lives of his common-law wife, 11-year-old son, brother, and sister-in-law.

In total, 14 residents from the Portland mountainside communities of Millbank, Comfort Castle, Ginger House and Seaman’s Valley were killed in the Christmas tragedy.

“My entire life mash up,” a distraught Palmer constantly repeated Tuesday as he recounted the events of the fateful night. His sorrow was extended beyond relatives, for his landlord, Althea Anderson, with whom he shared yard space, was also killed in the horrific crash.

“I was at home when I got a cell call about the crash and all of us [from the community] rush down there,” said Palmer, who resides in Millbank.

On reaching the accident scene at Dam Bridge, some 12 miles away, Palmer said that he climbed into the gully and began looking around. By then, lights from motor vehicles were being used to illuminate the ravine, and the fire brigade arrived.

“I saw my son sitting and his hand was fastened in the truck so I rushed to help him,” Palmer recalled. “He was sitting down, but when I hold on to him he was dead.”

Palmer said he immediately climbed back out of the gully. “I could not do anything else. I couldn’t think straight, my son dead,” he said bursting into uncontrollable wails.

According to survivor Joyce Whyte, who lives in Comfort Castle, it was an unbelievably frightening experience. She told the Sunday Observer that the market truck rode the side of the road and slid over the precipice tossing everything into the river bed below, then dropping on them.

“The truck just start go down an’ people a drop out an’ a bawl,” Whyte recalled.

“It was not driving fast,” she said. “If it was going fast and drive over the gully everybody woulda dead.”

Whyte explained that people sitting towards the back of the truck got the worst damage as they fell out and everything “tumble down” on them. “I was inside towards the middle, an’ drop down on people and goods drop on top of me,” she said.

Whyte was lucky, escaping with an injury to her hip and stomach, but her son, Faston Telfer, died.

“When we drop me start call out Faston, Faston and him never answer, me know say him dead,” she said.

“I spent Friday night in Port Antonio hospital,” she said. “I helped to identify the dead people.”

Up until the moment of the tragic accident it was a normal Friday evening for residents of the cool hillside farming communities in the shadow of the Blue Mountains, many of whom make their living from growing and selling yams, dasheen and bananas.

“Almost every Friday we would collect what we have and buy things from other people roun’ here,” to sell in Kingston.

“Dem take this trip all the while,” Palmer remarked. “Is almost three years now she a tek the journey,” he said of his spouse, 36-year-old Lasandra Dyce. “Sometimes she even do it two times a week; she go town Wednesday and then go back on Friday. Me neva expect anything.”

Palmer said the family packed the goods and loaded the truck as usual. His young son, Renaldo, accompanied his mother onto the vehicle that had transported them on numerous trips before.

They were all supposed to return Saturday night.

It was a weekly ritual for members of the three farming communities that relied on the vendors to sell their produce in the Kingston market.

“It’s not only the families that would benefit, the entire community has lost its marketing system,” declared Rev Marian Sutton at a meeting Tuesday to arrange assistance for the grieving relatives.

Rev Sutton of the St Luke’s Anglican Church in Comfort Castle said that only two market women are now left in the communities. “One says that she will not be going back into it, for she is traumatised,” he said.

Two days earlier, Lorna Lewis-Thompson, who lost her aunt Joyce Scott and uncle Aaron Lewis sat on the ground in front of the Millbank Police Station reflecting on the tragedy.

“I didn’t know that Friday morning was the last chat I was going to have with my auntie Joyce,” she said. “We talk so much about some things that are affecting her, like how her neighbours cut off her light. I told her it is not the end of the world and as long as God don’t cut you off he will put on your light. She said ‘my niece, I love to talk with you, you always give me some words of encouragement.”

Leroy Lewis, whose brother Aaron died in the crash, appeared to have accepted his loss. “Him gone already, and I ask God to help me,” said Lewis.

In the meantime Palmer, who suffered the greatest loss in terms of relatives killed, is trying to cope.

“I am a poor and humble man,” he said apologetically, as he showed the Sunday Observer his wooden house. “All of us up here do farming, an’ things not easy. I am taking sleeping pills and getting counselling.”

In the yard is another wooden house, that of his landlord. It is locked, and the curtains drawn.

“Is me alone here now,” Palmer shared.

He and his wife had five children, two from his spouse from a previous relationship, a 13 year-old girl, Renaldo, and a two-year-old boy.

The two younger children, Palmer said, are now staying with elder siblings elsewhere in the parish until he is able to take care of them.

Ironically, the section of the road that claimed the lives of the Portland residents is not the most treacherous leading to Millbank, the last district along the winding and unpaved road into the Blue Mountain hills.

A black flag – a sign that the district is in mourning – now adorns a light pole near the welcome sign. Of the 14 killed, Millbank lost eight.

– Additional reporting by

Everard Owen