Sixty-eight-year-old bedridden cancer patient John Scott attempted to drag himself to safety after a fire broke out in his Rousillac home early yesterday morning.
Relatives and neighbours also tried to save him by using buckets of water to out the flames, but unfortunately, he died.
Scott had stage four cancer that had spread to his liver and only recently doctors would have broken the grim news to his family that he only had six months to live.
Relatives had planned to cherish every moment they still had with him, including celebrating his birthday on December 8.
As tears streamed down her face, Scott’s daughter Desiree Charles said her father lived alone but she and other relatives were always with him as they live next to his house at Silver Stream Road, Aripero Village.
She said she left her father and went to bed shortly after 8 pm on Thursday.
“This morning around ten past four I heard a scream out. I heard someone call my name. I ran out. I realise the house was in flames. Neighbours and my brother ran out. They formed a bucket brigade and tried to control the fire but it was way out of hand for them to control,” she said.
She said after about 20 minutes after they were able to put out the fire and got him out of house.
“He was still breathing. They rest him down in the yard and that was it,” she recalled.
Charles believes that her father was trying to crawl off of the bed because of the position they found him in. He had burns on his hands and feet and other parts of his body.
Charles said the house had no electricity and it was possible that a mosquito coil was the source of the fire.
“That is the only thing that we light for him. Most of the time when we light it for him, he would have the children move it. I told him not to move it. He moved a lot on the bed so if something falls what would happen?” While he lived alone, Charles said she was always with him, sometimes until late at night.
Scott, a father of six, grandfather of 21 and great grandfather of three, was born in Grenada and moved to Trinidad at the age of five. Charles took care of her father and was very close to him.
Oropouche police are investigating.