Motorist’s high alcohol level

Press, 21 March 1983, Page 16

Motorist’s high alcohol level

PA Wellington The Wellington Coroner, Mr A. D. McGregor, said he could not recall a driver in a fatal motor accident with a higher blood-alcohol reading than that of a Wainuiomata man who had a reading of 334 milligrams. A Coroner’s Court hearing at Lower Hutt was told that Michael Henry Alsford Alfred Brenden Bond, aged 43, died on November 27, 1982, in his car at the southern end of a bridge over the Wainuiomata River near Wellington. He died of a traumatic rupture of the heart as the result of the motor accident, the Coroner said. D.S.I.R. reports said that a blood sample from Mr Bond contained 334 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millifjres of blood, and that

a urine sample contained 333 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of urine. The Coroner noted that the legal limit for driving was 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood.

“If ever a person should not have been driving, this was such a case,” the Coroner said. The amount of alcohol in the man’s blood was “enormous” and “quite extraordinary.” At the time of the accident, Mr Bond clearly was grossly intoxicated, the Coroner said.