By Belize Live News Staff: Sea Grape Drive at 4:45 in the morning is usually the quietest road on the island. On Friday it hosted a pursuit, a white four-seater golf cart moving recklessly north, and a police mobile closing the distance behind it.
The Belize Police Department reports that the patrol intercepted the cart and asked the young driver for his licence. He produced one, and that is where his morning unravelled twice over. The licence had expired. And even in its living days, it was a Class D, the motorcycle class, which has never once authorized anyone to drive a golf cart. For that, the law requires Class A.
The driver, identified as Ezekiel Chub, 18, a housekeeper of the San Mateo Area, was informed of the two offences his paperwork added up to: driving without a valid licence in respect of class, and using a motor vehicle without third-party risk insurance. Cautioned and read his rights, he made the trip to the San Pedro Police Station with the cart in tow, and by 6:45 a.m. the formal charges were sworn and laid. He answered the final caution with silence.
Chub, as with anyone charged, is presumed innocent unless and until the court rules otherwise.
Here is the lesson worth pinning to every cart rental counter and family cart key hook on the island: the licence classes are not interchangeable. Class D puts you on a motorcycle. Class A puts you behind a golf cart’s wheel. Holding one does not unlock the other, an expired card unlocks nothing, and the insurance question rides along with it all, because the uninsured cart that clips a tourist on a narrow island street leaves the injured with no third-party cover to claim.
The island’s sweep has now touched the bicycles and the golf carts in the same week. The message from San Pedro’s patrols could not be plainer: every wheel on these streets answers to the same rulebook, at every hour, including the ones before sunrise.
