MONTEGO BAY, St James –

Seventeen-year-old Odaine Whittingham, a former student of the Montego Bay Community College (MBCC), last week succumbed to injuries he received during a hit-and-run accident along the popular Montego Bay Hip Strip.

Yesterday, during a visit to the facility, the Observer West was told that Whittingham a first year computer student would have been taking his end-of- year examinations which started on Monday, had he been alive.

His absence proved heart-rending for his former peers,.

“They were emotional because he was seen as one of the leaders of his class, he was influential. He was very focussed, disciplined and highly committed,” Avril Wo Level James guidance counsellor at the MBCC told the Observer West yesterday.

Odaine’s mother, a distraught Norel Whittingham also spoke of the inspirational role that her son played in other students’ lives.

“He was a promising student with 9 CXCs class…a quiet person who always encouraged other students to stay focused in school. He was also a God-fearing child,” she said.

According to the bereaved mother, Odaine, a past student of the Herbert Morrison Comprehensive High School was hanging out with friends when a racing motor car plowed into him, hitting him of the wall on which he had been sitting.

One of his feet was fractured in two places and he died after undergoing surgery at the Cornwall Regional Hospital (CRH) last week.

The results of an autopsy at the Cornwall Regional Hospital are pending.