A 17-year-old boy who helped rescue spectators trapped beneath a runaway horse carriage during Wednesday’s disastrous Harbour Night told yesterday how he thought one man had been killed.

Jack Bridges, from Hamilton Parish, helped lift the vehicle into the air with three of his friends and others after the two horses pulling it crashed into a crowd of people watching a performance of the Gombeys on Front Street.

He told The Royal Gazette “It was very heavy, even with all the people lifting it, about 17 or 18 of them. When I looked down nobody was moving. There were eight or nine people and they were all kind of piled on each other. There was a guy right below me not moving face down and blood pouring from his head. I thought he was dead.”

He added: “As soon as the carriage was lifted I went. People were screaming on the intercom for people to get away and there was way too much blood for me. At first I felt okay but then on the way home it kind of hit me.”

Moments before he assisted the rescue effort, the Bermuda High School student leapt for his life as the wayward horses careered towards him. “If it had been 30 seconds later I would have been in that crowd,” he said. “Two of my friends were already in the crowd and just got out of the way. I was crossing the road to go and watch the performance and all I heard was this guy screaming: ‘get out of the way!’. I saw the horses and just jumped.”

The teenager was at Harbour Nights to watch his school friends — members of the St. John’s Youth Choir —perform at the event. Choristers Honor Brady and Paige Hallett, both 16, said they were crossing Front Street close to the flagpole minutes before they were due on stage when they saw the horses.

Paige, of Hamilton Parish, said: “I couldn’t move. Someone had to pull me out of the way. The horses tried to jump some people and they ended up tripping over them.

“People were screaming. There were people crying. Someone was throwing up in a trash can. It was terrifying; I didn’t sleep at all last night.”

Honor, from Smith’s, said: “It was very chaotic afterwards because everyone was trying to find where their families were. They told us: ‘Harbour Nights is off. The best thing you can do is go home’.”

Choir director Marjorie Pettitt was leading 22 youngsters across the road when the crowd parted in the middle. “It was a nightmare,” she said. “I was walking there like a mother goose with all these goslings behind me in a row. I couldn’t hear anything coming because of the noise of the Gombeys. There was nothing anybody could do.”

She said once it was clear that all her choristers were safe they began frantically searching for their families in the crowd. “There was ensuing panic because they were just worried to death about their parents.Until they were reunited they were in a terrible state.”

She added: “I have been working on the Island with kids for 40 years and I have never seen anything like it. The kids are traumatised. This was our first Harbour Night. They saw the carriage going into a man who then went underneath. It could have been a total, total disaster.”