MEN FINED FOR VANDALISM

Press, Issue 29236, 21 June 1960, Page 10

MEN FINED FOR VANDALISM

Interfered With Road Signs

(New Zealand Press Association* NEW PLYMOUTH, June 20.

Three Inglewood farmhands, Peter David Morton, aged 24; Bruce John Hayman, aged 23; and Noel Eric Hayman, aged 19, were jointly charged before Mr A. W. Yortt, S.M., in the Magistrate’s Court, New Plymouth, today, with interfering with a traffic sign, stealing a road sign and wilfully damaging a compulsory stop sign.

Bruce and Noel Hayman pleaded guilty to all three charges and were fined a total of £l5 10s each. Morton pleaded guilty to the first charge and was fined £3. The other charges against him were dismissed. Noel Hayman was fined an additional £7 10s for stealing a Ministry of Works sign. Senior-Sergeant B. G. Waller said that the joint offences occurred when the accused were returning in a car from a dance in the Hillsborough Hall on the evening of April 13. They had pushed the compulsory stop sign to the ground and had altered another sign so that it indicated that the Mountain road was the road to New Plymouth. They had also picked up a roadworks warning sign.

The accused had no reasonable excuse, except that they committed the offences for “an Easter lark.” Bruce Hayman told the Magistrate that they had committed the offences as “a kind of April fool joke.” “There is so much interference iwith private property that it seems to be an epidemic,” said the Magistrate. “The public are getting thoroughly fed up with it.”