THE ONLY SURVIVOR in this Bartley Road crash in 1972 was 11-year-old Desmond Lee. He lost his parents and both siblings. -- ST FILE PHOTO

IN A road accident about 35 years ago, a Singaporean family of five were almost entirely wiped out after the car they were travelling in was crushed between a truck and a tanker along Bartley Road.

Only the eldest son, 11-year-old Desmond Lee, survived.

The parents - Mr Ronnie Lee, 37, and MrsJaney Lee, 32 - and two of their three children, Esther, eight, and Lionel, seven, died.

The family were on their way back to their Sin Ming Road home after a Sunday meal of mee siam in Katong on Nov 26, 1972, when the accident happened.

Desmond suffered serious cuts and was warded for a week. Upon regaining consciousness, his first words were: 'Where are mum and dad? Why have they not come to see me?'

But doctors did not allow his grandparents, relatives and friends to tell the boy the truth about his family until he had fully recovered.

After he left the hospital, the orphan lived with his grandparents in Sunshine Terrace off Upper Serangoon Road. He never returned to the family's rented house in Sin Ming Road.

When The Straits Times caught up with him 15years later in 1987, the then-26-year-old was working as an office equipment salesman and still living with his grandparents.

He said: 'When something like that happens to you at such a young age - suddenly you have no parents, no brother, no sister - it is very difficult.'

The Sunday Times tried searching for him unsuccessfully last week. He should be 47 now.

Dianah Suhaimi