Man dies while seeking aid in St Elizabeth

He was almost there. After pedalling six long miles on a rusted bicycle, the man everyone in Pondside, St Elizabeth, called 'Bubus' could finally see the line of relief trucks in the distance. Where he was headed, no one knows for sure - but what is certain is that he never made it.

On Friday afternoon - the same day relief distribution began - Bubus's body gave out along Crane Road, the low-lying coastal stretch that had only just become passable. His bicycle toppled beside him, one hand still gripping the handlebar.

"We pass him going inside the town and we a wonder if something do him," recalled Rachel Trenchfield, who was travelling from Treasure Beach with her two children.

"We reverse fi check him, but by the time we reach, him a breathe hard. Within a minute, him just stop breathe completely."

Her children clung to her as they stared at the fallen man. Around them, the road was choked with vehicles and people trudging toward Black River, desperate for supplies and news. There was no cell service, no working landline, no ambulance to call. The Black River Hospital, itself battered by the hurricane, had been evacuated the day before.

Amid the confusion, members of THE STAR team hurried back to the Black River Fire Station to alert emergency personnel, as police and soldiers nearby struggled to manage swelling crowds and poor-relief lines.

All around, the smell of rot hung thick - spoiled produce, dead animals, and stagnant water mingling in the heavy air.

Back in Pondside, Bubus had lived a quiet, solitary life after retirement. His neighbour, Dwayne Ewit, one of the few residents still in the area, said the storm had taken everything from him.

"He was always in the town by the bakery," Ewit told THE STAR. "Quiet man, early riser, never one to beg help. The hurricane mash up the house, and him live one-a-way, by himself."

On Friday, Trenchfield never reached her family in Brampton. After Bubus collapsed, she parked the car and stood motionless in the road, her children clutching her waist as the wind still whispered through broken trees.

"As the hurricane finished, we only heard from them once," she said.

"When we see him drop like that, me just stop. I had to pause my journey."

For a long moment, the whole road seemed to grieve with her.

"Everything inside me just freeze," she said softly.

"After all we go through in the storm, seeing that make me realise how close we all come to it. Me affi stop and breathe."