TO GET A HOME

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 27, 1 February 1945, Page 6

TO GET A HOME

AIRMAN COMMITS THEFT

PROBATION FOR TWO YEARS

The unusual, housing hardship suffered by the family of Donald Phillip Maddox (35), who had admitted the theft of Air Force building material, was pleaded on the prisoner's behalf by Mr. Trimmer to Mr. Justice Callan to-day. Counsel called evidence of Maddox's good record in the* force and submitted testimony of housing difficulties for three years encountered by Maddox's wife and three children. They had lived in a caravan on the roadsides and school playgrounds until Maddox got a section at Glen Eden on which he put a kitchen, bathroom and washhouse, the two latter serving as bedrooms also.

Counsel stressed that the material taken by Maddox was to make this three-roomed place a habitable house, and was taken in daylight and openly from an Air Force dump where much of the material lay wasting.

His Honor agreed that the case was not of taking material to turn into money, and in view of the man's excellent Air Force character probation would be granted, though he felt some diffidence about it. Maddox would be admitted to probation for two years, with a condition that within three months he pay £10 and also whatever sum was fixed as restitution to the Air Force Department.