BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN - The widower of a pregnant Malaysian woman who died in a freak car accident in Borneo last year after her neck was pierced by a metal shard from a faulty Takata airbag held their dying daughter in his arms for 10 minutes as the prematurely delivered infant's life sapped away.
According to 41-year-old Welhelmo Rodriguez Caido, doctors performed an emergency operation to save their unborn baby girl after the Honda City car driven by his wife crashed head-on with another car in Malaysia last July, fatally injuring her, but the infant was in critical condition and died two days later.
"Imagine, two lives died in my arms. My wife died in my arms, and then my baby also," Caido said in an interview with Kyodo News in Kuala Belait, a quiet oil town in the sultanate of Brunei where he works as an electrician on offshore oil rigs.
The deaths of 43-year old Law Suk Leh and the baby set off a global alarm on the danger of defective airbags.
Caido said his daughter did not open her eyes or cry like other newborns and had to depend on a ventilator to breathe, as her heart became weaker and weaker.
Recalling the agonizing moment when the doctor decided to take his baby off the ventilator and let her die naturally, he said, "The doctor checked her heart, and it was still OK. Then I talked with her for about 10 minutes, and then the doctor again checked her heart. The third time, the doctor said, 'She's passed away already.'"
"At least I still had time to talk to her. I said to her, 'You have to take care of your mummy. Mummy will take care of you there. You are in good hands in heaven,' and then, 'Maybe one day we will meet again in the second life,'" he recalled in the interview, sometimes stopping as he was overwhelmed by sadness.
The accident happened just about two weeks before his wife was due to give birth to their second child in mid-August. The couple had driven from their home in Brunei to visit her parents in Sibu in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. They planned to then travel to Sarawak's capital Kuching so that his wife could give birth there.
The couple had arrived in Sibu on Friday after a six-hour drive from Brunei. He recalled dyeing his wife's hair on Sunday morning. "I bought a very nice hair dye for her, because I told her, 'Mummy, since our age is like this already, we need to cover it up.' She was very, very happy."
They decided to leave behind their 7-year-old son with her parents to attend a church service that afternoon. After attending the service, they went to the mall to shop for their baby.
"We had ice cream at the mall. Actually, it was like a date since it was just the two of us, as we did not bring our son. It was very normal. We just talked about our baby."
As they were heading back to the house of his parents-in-law with his wife at the wheel, their car collided with another car at an intersection.
"As far as I remember, we had a green light, and our speed was just normal. There was a car coming from our right. It made a right turn," he recalled, prompting him to shout "Mummy! Car!"
He fainted for a moment and when he became conscious, he found her unconscious with a lot of blood flowing from her neck.
Not wanting to wait for an ambulance, he sought help from bystanders. A stranger offered his car and they drove toward a hospital. "At that time, I didn't know whether my wife was still alive or not," he said.
While on the way to hospital, they were met an ambulance and his wife was transferred to it.
"When we brought her from the car, I could see that her mouth was still moving...But the hospital was very far -- too far -- away from the site of our accident."
At the hospital, a doctor told him they had to remove the baby in an effort to save her, and a few minutes later he was told his wife had passed away.
He only came to know later that she died from injuries caused to her neck by the metal shard from the airbag. "The postmortem confirmed that it was from the airbag...I said I don't want to see the thing that killed her."
"The airbag is supposed to save life in the case of emergency, but why is it the opposite? It killed two lives. If you see the picture of the car, it (the collision) was not so serious."
In November, Takata Corp. said in a statement that Honda Motor Co. had filed recall notifications in several countries, including Japan.
"This recall is being conducted because an investigation into an accident that occurred in Malaysia in July 2014 found that the moisture absorption control of the gas generating agent in some driver seat airbags had not been correctly implemented at the time of the manufacture," the statement said.
"As a result...an inflator canister may rupture when the airbag deploys," it said in the statement, which also "offered our deepest condolences to the victim who lost her life in the accident."
Four deaths in four separate accidents in the United States have also reportedly been linked to Takata air bags installed in Honda vehicles.
"Because of what happened to us also...this is a wakeup call for the car companies," Caido said.
"The main thing here is the safety of people. This is about life. Life is fragile. A single thing happened, accident, gone...so you need to be aware of this faulty airbag."
Caido and his wife met in 2004 when he was a 31-year-old dance and aerobics teacher, and she was a 33-year-old music and piano teacher. They married in 2009.
She had bought the secondhand Honda car around 2005. It was in very good condition and never gave them any problem before the accident happened, he said.
"Deep inside my heart I am still aching. It's very painful, it still haunts me, the accident," he said.
source: www.abs-cbnnews.com
