Acting on pure maternal instinct, single mother Monique Stewart flung her body over her infant son as a shield when the roof of her George Town apartment collapsed as Tropical Storm Grace passed over Grand Cayman on 18 Aug.
Stewart’s act saved her 1-year-old son Conrad Malcolm when the rafters gave way in their Mary Street apartment.
Tropical Storm Grace. – Photo: CI Regiment
“I’m a single mother… so just thinking about losing him was a nightmare,” Stewart sobbed as she sat down with the Cayman Compass to share her story.
She said when the roof collapsed, she was battered as she covered her son’s body with her own.
“At one point I said, ‘Monique, this is it’, because the [roof] board… the zinc was back and forth at me… my body was bruised.”
Homeless and scared
The apartment was so badly damaged in the storm, that the mother and son had to move out. Stewart, a domestic worker, is currently sharing a small one-bedroom studio apartment with her sister and boyfriend.
“I’m trying my best just to find somewhere to stay with [my son],” she said.
She said the storm was the worst experience of her life.
As storm winds started to impact Grand Cayman in the early morning hours of 18 Aug., she realised it might be worse than she had expected, and she really began to worry when the winds began rocking the rafters.
“I tried to save him and myself…. Even now I’m still scared,” Stewart said, adding that she remains traumatised by the ordeal.
She and her son had to be evacuated from the apartment by the Cayman Islands Regiment during the storm.
The 30-year-old mom, who moved to Cayman eight years from her native Jamaica, said when she heard a storm was coming, she thought it would be like Eta last year.
“I went and buy up candle and stuff like that because I had the baby. I said, ‘OK, maybe it’s a little one passing’,” she said.
An ordeal like no other
Stewart said she had been following the progress of the storm from 17 Aug., but was busy doing laundry the night before it struck, and did not catch the news that Grace’s intensity had been building.
“About six o’clock it started to get heavy, but the baby was asleep. … I got to the kitchen to make the breakfast, then I hear a loud bang,” she said. At that point, she decided to pack a bag of belongings in preparation for leaving the apartment if the storm worsened.
Stewart went into the bedroom where her son was asleep and started to grab her passport, other documents and clothes from a drawer to put into a bag.
“I hear the bang again and by the time I look up, the ceiling bang my head,” she said. As she reached out for her son, a rafter fell on her back, and she used her body to shield the boy.
“I started to panic because it getting worse, water coming in… everything coming in at once,” she said. Stewart called 911 for help, and she could heard her neighbours calling her.
“I started to panic… I get scared of everything. The board blowing, the zinc… everything started to blow, hitting me back and forth with him. I tried to wrap him up in a towel to try to save him and to shield him,” she said.
Within half an hour, a regiment team, led by Commander Colonel Simon Watson, was at her door.
“I always hear talk about Titanic. I just imagine when you are on the Titanic and you see the help coming, it was something like that,” she said, as she described how relieved she felt when the regiment arrived.
Watson, she said, was the first in the apartment and he took hold of her son and rushed them both to safety to the Red Cross shelter in George Town.
After the storm passed, Stewart’s sister went to her apartment “to save stuff, but everything was under water”. All she had with her was her documents and the clothes she was wearing.
“When I went to Red Cross [shelter] I changed my clothes, and they gave me some clothes for me and the baby. The rescue team, they were a big help for me,” she said. Stewart said she is still distressed from her harrowing storm experience and has not been able to bring herself to return to the apartment.
“I don’t go back there because it’s too much. Even when I close my eyes, [it’s] coming back,” she said.
Anyone able to assist Stewart and her son can email her at [email protected].
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