FELL ASLEEP?

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 29, 4 February 1939, Page 15

FELL ASLEEP?

BUSHMAN'S DEATH.

RIDING GN BUSH TRAIN. ' RUN OVER BY TRUCK. (By Telegraph.—Own Correspondent.) ROTORUA, this'day. A verdict of accidental death was returned by the coroner, Mr. W. L. Richards, to-day at the conclusion of tho inquest "concerning the deatli of Donald Ewen Morrison (01), a bushman, who died on January 25, following injuries received when he fell from a timber truck on which he was .travelling

from Ngongotalia to the bush at Mangorcwa.

Medical evidence was to the ciTcct that Morrison suffered multiple bone

injuries and laceration of the brain as a result of the fall.

Hubert -Lyndon Marcroft, driver of the locomotive which was hauling: the rake of timber trucks on which Morrison was travelling, said that deceased was sitting on top of two sacks of chaff on one of 'the trucks. The accident occurred on a straight stretch of line and at a place where there were no overhanging - tree branches. Morrison must cither have fallen asleep and fallen off tlie truck, or else have become ill. A section of the train was derailed as a result of the accident, deceased falling under the wheels of a truck and I causing a coupling to break.

Clifford Gordon Agnew, a bushnian, said that oil January 18 lie had visited Morrison in the latter's wliare, and had found him ill. Morrison had had "a fit, but had recovered and reported for work next day.

The coroner, in returning a verdict, said that the evidence did not disclose the actual . circumstances responsible for Morrison's fall.