She screamed: ‘Take him, take him' - recollections of tragedy in plain sight

The scene will remain imprinted in one man’s mind forever: a young mother desperately holding her baby out of the window of a sinking car before it disappeared into the murky water of Grand Harbour.
It was 21 years ago today, during the 2001 Freedom Day Regatta, that Josianne Cesare, 20, and baby Jean Luca drowned after the car they were sitting in plunged into the sea.

Joseph Scerri was mere inches away from reaching the child.
“I will never forget it. I was swimming right under the car window and she held the child out of the driver’s window. I think she didn’t see us there.
“I was banging on the door and telling her to let the baby go. I did not want to grab onto the car for fear of pushing it down. She was screaming: ‘Take him, take him’,” he says, his eyes welling up even two decades later.
How the Sunday Times reported the tragedy the day after.
“Then, sadly, she pulled the baby back in. And suddenly, within seconds, the car got swallowed up by the water. It was like dropping lead into the sea.”
Sitting at a cafe in Cospicua, Scerri (known as Pele) and his friends Pierre Bugeja and Alan Harvey, look on at the quay where it all happened – the tragedy that shook the entire...