STETTIN, Trelawny — Vanessa Buckle, 18, one of the three Holmwood High students who died in last Thursday’s horrific crash of a bus taking them to school, had told her mother a few weeks ago she had dreamed of a bus crash in which a number of students were killed.

“Sometime in March, she told me of a dream she had of the bus turning over and whole heap a children dead. But she was never a passenger in the bus in her dream. I said ‘Venessa, you born the 25th of January and January people see things before it happen. Work with the dream and don’t go back on the bus’,” Vanessa’s weeping mother Sharon McKenzie told the Observer Friday at her home in the southern Trelawny farming district of Stettin.

The dream was enough for the sixth form student to refrain from taking the ill-fated bus, named ‘Not Nice’, which had a reputation for speeding and loud music.

“She came off the bus for two weeks straight and mek her friends them call her back on the bus. That is why she go dead,” McKenzie cried. “Vanessa should never dead pon that bus because she get the dream too plain to dead on that bus.”

Buckle, 17-year-old Lyonisa Whyte, Petrina Clarke, also 17, and Anthony Brown, the owner of the bus who was acting as conductor, all died when the vehicle, which was said to be speeding, failed to negotiate a steep, winding corner at about 7:30 am and crashed into a wall, before overturning at Bryce Hill in Manchester.

Other schoolchildren who were passengers in the bus were taken to hospital.

On Friday, McKenzie described Vanessa, whose goal was to become a nurse, as a humble child who never gave her any trouble.

“She caring, she always hear what me say, she don’t give no trouble. She never leave me no time. Only from school to home,” said McKenzie.

A short trek from Stettin, in the Wire Fence community, Petrina’s mother Madge Virgo recounted that her daughter had also stopped taking the bus to school because the brand of music played in the vehicle conflicted with her Christian principles.

“When she started going to Holmwood, that was the bus she took to go to school, but after a while, because she is a Christian, she said the music they were playing was too much for her Christianity. It was destroying her Christianity in a sense and then she kind of slack off it for a while and she didn’t go on it,” Virgo told the Observer.

“I don’t know what happened that morning because I left her in the house… we always go out the house together and I left her in the house that morning, I don’t know.”

Although grieving, Virgo is, however, firm in her belief that her daughter, whose ambition was to become a pharmacist and eventually own a hotel, was resting peacefully.

“I know she is a Christian and a very good child, so when I see her lying there I found peace within. I know she has found rest so that has comforted me,” Virgo said.

Winston ‘Manno’ Moodie, Lyonisa’s grandfather, said she always had to be coerced to travel on that bus.

“Me see her a go school and a run from the bus boy them, she no want to go with them and them run her down and draw her in say dem naw lef her. That mean say a some sign she did see but could not control herself,” Moodie said.

But another family member said Lyonisa could not avoid travelling on the bus as it was one of the few which travelled from Stettin straight to Holmwood in Christiana, Manchester.

He said the teen had a promising career ahead of her as a netball player.

Madge Virgo, the mother of Patrina Clarke, said her daughter had stopped taking the ill-fated bus to school because the music played on it conflicted with her Christian principles.

Sharon McKenzie (left) mother of 18-year-old Vanessa Buckle, one of the three Holmwood High female students killed when a bus taking them to school overturned at Bryce, Manchester last Thursday, is comforted by a family member at her Stettin home on Friday.