BOTH DEAD.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 106, 7 May 1935, Page 9

BOTH DEAD.

FATHER AND SON. HAWKE'S BAY GUN TRAGEDY. ACCIDENTS IN LAKE PUNT. (liy Telegraph.—Press Association.) HASTINGS, this day. A tragic shooting accident occurred on Ohiti Lake, a few miles from Fernhiil, yesterday,, when a Hastings business man and his son were both mortally wounded through the accidental discharge of a gun. They were brought into Hastings by the free ambulance and taken to the Soldiers' Memorial Hospital, where, later, they both died. The victims were: — Harold Smith, a well-known land agent, died late yesterday afternoon. Douglas Smith, his son, aged 17 years, died at 11.10 p.m. Few details of the accident are available as there were no eye-witnesses, but Mr. l'\ Holz, \Vlio went out with the ambulance, states that apparently the younger Smith, in getting out of a punt, seized by the muzzle a gun which was lying in the punt and that by some means it discharged one of the two cartridges with which it. was loaded, and Smith, jun., was shot in the right side of the abdomen.

What happened in the next moment or two is not clear, but it appears that the father then went to pick up the same gun, also by the muzzle, and that the second cartridge discharged and shot him through the right chest and lung. A man who had been shooting alone on another part of the island heard cries for help and hurriedly rowed back to the homestead to summon help. The ambulance was unable to approach nearer than a mile and a half to the scene of the accident. A doctor and Mr. Holz had to row in a punt to the island, and after an anaesthetic had been administered to the injured men they were towed back to the shore iu a Maori canoe. With the assistance of some Maoris they were then carried a mile and a half to the ambulance.

Mr. Harold Smith had been in business in Hastings as a land and commission agent for 15 years and was married to a daughter of the late Rev. Mr. Cockerill, an Anglican clergyman in Hastings, and of the late Mrs. Cockerill, who was killed in the earthquake in 1931.

Douglas Smith was the cider of two sons who were the only children of the family.