BOY SHOT HIMSELF

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30092, 28 March 1963, Page 16

BOY SHOT HIMSELF

Extraordinary Accident (N.Z. Press Association) WELLINGTON, March 27. “Tragic” and ’extraordinary’’ w’as the description the Coroner (Mr P. Keesing) applied to events leading up to the death of Stephen John Todd, aged 11, at Lower Hutt on February 6. The boy shot himself in the eye with an old pistol in his home, the Coroner was told today. Ernest Lawrence Todd, father of the dead boy, said the pistol had been hidden, but on the day of the accident he had taken it from its hiding-place because he intended to surrender it to the police. There was no ammunition for the weapon, he said. The boy’s cousin. Gerard Michael Fitzgibbon, aged 11, said Stephen had had a bullet which fitted the pistol for two years. Stephen had removed the pistol from his parents’ room.

le had placed the bullet in the cliamber and pulled the trigger three or four times without discharging the gun. lie was sitting on his bed playing with the gun when it went off. He had rolled off the bed and sagged to the floor. The Coroner said it was an extraordinary accident which had happened in spite of the father’s care. He found the boy died of a gunshot wound accidentally self-inflicted.