17 years on…By Enid JoaquinFebruary 17th, this year, marked exactly seventeen years to the date of one of the most horrendous tragedies to have occurred in the town of Linden.It was a day when the entire town was plunged into mourning, following the death of four school children, whose lives were snuffed out, after the bus they were travelling in exploded.Melissa WillsFRIENDS FOREVERThe four children that perished, nine year old Mellissa Wills, eight year old Dacia Alert, nine year old Chiaka McKinnon and eight year old Onica Best, were very good friends and school mates, and were students of the Mackenzie Primary School. On that fateful day, they were on a bus on their way home, from what should have been a school tour. But the tour ended up being a ‘picnic’ on the Linden /Soesdyke highway, after their bus developed problems on the way to Georgetown.A Dodge Ram, called the ‘Cutty Ranks’, was driven to the scene to pull it.? The Dodge Ram was also defective. Someone had rigged up a bottle of gasoline in ‘Cutty Ranks’ vehicle. That individual had then inserted one end of a hose in the container of gasoline and used the hose as a makeshift fuel line leading to the engine.Someone then made the foolish and fatal decision to transfer some of the children to the Dodge Ram with the gasoline container.It was in the vicinity of Guyana Stores at Kara Kara that tragedy struck.BALL OF FIRESome boys that were playing football nearby were the first to get a glimpse of the horror that was taking shape. One of them had spotted a ball of fire at the bottom of the ill-fated Dodge Ram, as it stopped for some children to disembark.An alarm was immediately raised, but by the time people got to the bus, it was too late- it had exploded.A few fortunate children and a teacher made it to safety, but the four friends, who had been sitting together, would die together, even as they had played together; and because they were burnt beyond recognition, they were also interred together, in a single coffin.Dacia AlertTheir funeral was one of the largest to be held at the Mackenzie Sports Club Ground.As news of the tragedy spread, frantic Lindeners converged on the scene, many of them wondering whether their child was in the bus, and checking other tour buses as they came in, bawling and screaming, all the while. There was hardly a dry eye. It was a heartbreaking and utterly chaotic scene.“Fortunately for the driver of the bus, he had disappeared, or there might have been another tragedy that day”, one eyewitness later reported.A DAY THEY WILL NEVER FORGETRelatives of the four children described that day as the most tragic of their lives.Desiree Alert, the mother of Dacia Alert, noted in a recent interview, “I can never forget that day. I had made a brand new uniform for her- I used to sew all her clothes.? And I remember seeing her all decked out in her new clothes, and so happy’.Mrs. Alert said that she learnt of the tragedy as she was making her way home from work. “A man come up to me and say moms, you ain’t hear what happen, yall ain’t hear Cutty Ranks bus blow up,NFL Jerseys From China, and some children dead?”“Well after that was chaos, I had a bicycle but I couldn’t even ride, I had to run. My niece she later went and peeped in the bus and saw these charred bodies, and there was channa and other food items strewn on the floor.“But you couldn’t recognize anyone of the children. It was later while at the hospital that I confirmed that Dacia was dead, because there was a list of names of the children that were accounted for, and hers was not on the list. But somehow, I had known all along, because I knew that if she was alive, being the child she was, she would have run to me and given me all the details.“She was unique and brilliant, I never had to tell her to do her homework or anything, and even at such a tender age, she used to wash her own clothes. I often wonder what she would have turned out to be.”The casket in which four victims were buriedAfter her daughter’s death, Desiree? Alert quit her job as a Librarian at the Linden Library, as she felt she just couldn’t cope. She also went into depression and almost became a recluse. She later realized she was pregnant with another child, which she would give birth to eight months later.Alert named her last daughter Sarai, and would later return to the world of work, when the child entered school.“I became so concerned about her safety that I wanted to work at her school, it was like I had developed a sort of paranoia, after Dacia’s death, so I felt I had to be around wherever she was, to ensure that she was safe”.She did get the job as a librarian, but at another school, which she noted helped her to return to a semblance of ‘normalcy’.However, even now, after 17 years, Alert still cries for her daughter, as she did during our interview.Mellissa Wills was the youngest child for her parents.The eldest of the Wills clan, Monifa, said that