THREE DEATHS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 279, 25 November 1941, Page 4

THREE DEATHS

FATHER'S FATAL LEAP

ANAESTHETIC IN FOOD PIPE (0.C.) SYDNEY, November 20. Three tragic deaths were reported on one day of this week. At Manly Coroner's Court a boy of 17 described his desperate efforts to prevent his father, William Valentine Herbert, 48, of the R.A.A.P., from jumping to his death over a cliff. The boy said that on September 21 he went for a walk with his father to the top of the cliff behind the cottage in which they were living at Newport. I could see by the look in my father s eyes that there was something wrong with him," the boy told the coroner. "I asked him several times to come home, but he would not answer me. "Finally, he lay down on his stomach on the edge of a rock, with his head, arms and shoulders over tHo,? f e " t?°i ? lold of his legs and tiled to pull him away. He got tw, h v §to one of his hands. Jii P J h e slipped over the edge and fell about -:oft. He appeared to land on his knees. He scrambled to his f ee j j v , ? ver the other edge and landed on his head on a large rock." Mrs, Herbert said her husband was a grazier at Adaminaby and enlished in March. He was a captain in the R.A.F. in the last war. He recently had a nervous breakdown and was on two months' sick leave. The coroner found suicide

a Ad ?} aid e. it was alleged that Aubrey Eric Simpson, manager of Sangara Rubber Plantation, Ltd. wx'ote 13 death notes before rigging up the elaborate death trap by means of which he took his life on Tuesday. Apparently he spent his last hours on a letter from his 17-year-old daughter who is living with her mother at Mosman, Sydney, to which Simpson formerly belonged. He nailed the stock of a double-barrelled shot gun r and to the back verandah of his Adelaide home and attached string to both triggers.

This was on Monday night. He went to bed and slept" until 9 a.m. on Tuesday when he was awakened by a woman who came to clean up for him. Simpson told her to take some letters he had written, which included one to a friend. When the friend opened this letter he immediately telephoned the police, who hurried to the house and found Simpson dead. The barrel of the gun was lying on the floor, it had broken from the stock when Simpson pulled the string. Another extraordinary death is the subject of an adjourned inquest in Sydney. It concerns the death under an anaesthetic, at Concord Military Hospital on October 30, of sn A.i.f. soldier, William Joseph O Reillv, aged 20. who was being operated on for septic tonsils. It is suggested that the anaesthetic tube was inserted into his food pipe instead of his windpipe. His stomach became hard and distended An incision was made to allow gas to escape and he was criven antishock treatment, but failed to rally. ~ Or. D. S. Brooks, Government Medical Officer at Burwood, said that in his opinion death was due to shock caused by rupture of the stomach. He considered it was the duty of the anaesthetist to see that the tube entered the windpipe and not the foodpipe. He would not say it was any one's special duty to watch for distension of the abdomen, but there would be a general obligation for everybody present to watch for it. The inquest stands adjourned.