Car Mows Down Shoppers

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30759, 25 May 1965, Page 17

Car Mows Down Shoppers

(N.Z. Press Assn. — Copyright)

PERTH, May 24. Two people were killed in Perth today when a runaway car with the driver slumped at the wheel mowed down city shoppers as it jumped the kerb and ran 50 yards down the footpath, near the Perth Town Hall. Those dead are the driver of the ear aad a woman pedestrian who was trapped when the car swept into the crowd. Neither has been identified. The car. a new sedan, was stopped by a tubular steel shop front support after it had smashed two plate glass windows. Three ambulances ran a shuttle service to get the injured to hospital. The runaway car was first noticed at the corner of St. George’s terrace and Barrack street.

It was travelling north uphill towards the town hall. A truck driver, Trevor Williams. aged 32, had parked his cool-drink delivery truck on the north-west corner of the intersection. He said: “I was on the footpath side unloading crates when a bus driver shouted out I looked up and saw this car side-swipe the corner of my truck. “The driver of the car was slumped over the wheel. “The car kept on and I saw it hit people at the corner of Hay and Barrack streets. “People were lying everywhere when I reached the scene.” The car was chased by Mr Wally Flood. He said: “I was just outside the Perth Building Society office when I saw the car hit the truck. “Without altering speed it went in a perfectly straight line up Barrack street heading for the north-east corner of Barrack and Hay. Over The Wheel "1 saw the driver collapsed leaning sideways over the wheel. My immediate reaction was that he was dead. “I chased behind the car. I don’t know what I hoped to

do but I knew something was going to happen. “There was no vehicle traffic moving by the town hall intersection. The lights were against traffic and city shoppers were bunched up on the corners waiting for the single ‘walk’ signal.” It was one of these groups of pedestrians into which the car plunged. It swept them down the footpath, ripping out a side window of a bank. Through Window

Then the car plunged through a store’s show-case window before crashing to a halt

The driver was found on the passenger side of the front seat and was dead before help arrived. The woman pedestrian who was killed was found jammed under the centre of the car. A St. John Ambulance driver, Murray Allum, in the first van at the scene crawled under the car and examined her immediately but found that she was dead. The windscreen of the car was smashed and the radiator crushed by the impact. Two men outside a shop were injured but did not go to hospital.