Blow fatal — 9 years later

Press, 1 December 1978, Page 4

Blow fatal — 9 years later

PA Wellington A Salvation Army social worker, Anthony Sushames, has died, nine years after he was brutually bashed in an attempt to help a victim of a brawl in Wellington. Captain Sushames died yesterday in Porirua Hospital, aged 41 A savage blow with a rock had left him blind, crippled and mute. He never recovered consciousness.

Captain Sushames was | attacked in a Newtown street on December 4, 1969. On the way home from church with his wife, Helen, and their three children, the, social worker stopped his car: to help a man injured in a ! brawl. As he bent over the victim he was hit on the head by a rock.

Later Mrs Sushames said she saw a man still holding a rock and calling it “the murder weapon.”

I Captain Sushames was [taken to hospital and ‘ returned home the same' 'night. Two days later he was I ] readmitted in a critical con- ] dition with severe brain dam--1 age. Mrs Sushames said the inews of her husband’s death ]had still come as a shock although she and her children ] had accepted they would never know Captain Sushlames as he was before the I attack. 1 The family lives at the . Salvation Army’s Bethany Hospital in Christchurch, ] where Mrs Sushames is a ; social worker.

She regularly flew to Wellington to visit her husband, although he never recognised her.

“Life has to go on,” she said earlier this year. “We miss Tony, but I know we are doing exactly what he would have wanted us to.”