REFUSES TO TALK.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 113, 16 May 1939, Page 7

REFUSES TO TALK.

MAN SHOT IN THE BACK.

PROBLEM FOR SYDNEY POLICE

(From Our Own Correspondent.)

SYDNEY, May 11

Detectives are etill trying to discover who shot Richard Mealing, or Barker, aged 32, in Bayswater Avenue, Darlinghurst, at 4.4.") a.m. on Sunday.

Mealing, who is known to the police and his acquaintances as "The Oyster," because he w never known to give away any information, lias refused to tell the police anything about tlio shooting. When they asked him how ho had conic hy puts and bruises on his face, he said that earlier in the night he had been in a brawl, but would 7iot say with whom it had occurred or what the cause of it had been. He gave the police an address in Bourke Street, East Sydney, but was not known there. He* is a wharf labourer.

Residents in Bayswater Avenue were awakened by a loud report, followed by groaning. Soon a small crowd in night attire had gathered about Mealing, who wae lying in a pool of blood in the gateway of one of the tenements. The bullet had entered the middle of his back, travelled through his body, and come out on the right eide of his chest. The police could not find the spent bullet, but the wound showed that it had been of heavy calibre. The revolver had evidently been pressed into his backwhen it wae fired, for there were black powder marks around the wound. Detectives could find no one who had witnessed the shooting. Mealing was hurried to hospital and given a blood tramfueion.