Two days after 21-year-old Samuel “Sammy” Pierre drowned while hunting iguanas with friends, Coast Guard divers yesterday found his body near the Cipero River mouth.
Pierre’s mother Sharon De Breau, who was praying that somehow her son survived, is still thankful that his body was found.
“But I thank God they find his body. You know sometimes people die and you never find them and yuh just keep grieving, I grieving still but is God making me strong. Ah telling allyuh is God making me strong. I real hurt to know Samuel left home and was not able to return back to me safe. Ah real hurt,” said De Breau at her Pleasantville home. She said his body was found in a mangrove.
According to a press release from the T&T Coast Guard, searches were initiated since they received the report on Friday and yesterday an unidentified body was found in the river mouth.
They stated that the body would be handed over to the relevant authorities for official identification.
However, Pierre’s mother said she went down to the scene where she identified her son’s body.
“I telling them let me touch my son. I tell them I don’t care how dutty he looking, let me hug up my son, that is my child. But, they say I cannot cause how he was in the mangrove,” she lamented.
The mother is questioning how her son drowned because he could swim. “The police have to do some more investigation into that,” she said. Recalling that Pierre loved to hunt iguanas and would sometimes keep them as pets and then release them, she said he was a nice, loving person and a hard worker.
She said when his friends came to their home on Friday looking for Pierre she told them he was not home, but she believes he heard them and later met up with them.
“And he walk out (of the house) and he smiling. He went with a happy heart. I ent thinking that is the last time I will see that boy.”
Pierre, a labourer, went with his four teenage friends to hunt iguanas in the area of the Cipero River off Riverside Drive, San Fernando on Friday.
They met a man who then took them to an area where they could find the iguanas. The friends told police that the man spotted an iguana and swam across the river.
Pierre, his friends said, was attempting to swim across the river when he got into difficulties and drowned.
Investigations are continuing.