SONS ASSAULT FATHER

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 250, 18 July 1931, Page 9

SONS ASSAULT FATHER

Visit House When Drunk “OLD MAN TOO TOUGH” Dominion Special Service Masterton, July 17. As the result of a family fracas in Wakeman Street, Pahiatua, on a recent Saturday evening, two brothers, Reginald Arthur Futcher and Herbert Futcher, appeared before Mr. J. Miller, S.M., in the Pahiatua Magistrate’s Court charged with assaulting their father, behaving in a disorderly manner, using indecent language, and with wilfully breaking a window. , ■ , Constable F. Burrell said that the two brothers were living away from home, and seemed to have had some sort of grievance in the past against their father. On the Saturday evening in question they were intoxicated, and went down to their parents’ house. Their mother was in the kitchen, and when she saw they were intoxicated she told them to go away. They went out on to the pavement and commenced throwing stones on to the front veranda. They both moved .in on to the veranda and broke two Windows of; a front room in which their father was sleeping, and were forcing the front door when the father, only half clad, came out and met them in the passage. A fight started in the passage, and continued out on to the pavement. The constable said he was summoned, and arrived to see one of the defendants and the father struggling on the ground. The mother was on the footpath calling out in great distress, and she had had her elbow dislocated. It had been said in Pahiatua that the youths “took to” their mother, but this was not true. Defendants had cuts on their hands' and there was blood everywhere. The constable took both youths and the mother in a taxi for medical attention. In reply to the magistrate, Constable Burrell said that the father received bruises to the side ‘of the face, and his eyes were “bunged up.” However, he thought the sons got the worst of it as they were drunk. One had afterwards admitted that “the old man was too tough.” The magistrate said that he would take into consideration that the constable had given the youths a good character, and had said that the assault would not have occurred had they been sober. He would take that into consideration because if they had committed the assault when 1 sober ’he would have sent them to g °Each of the defendants was fined £4 for assault, in default three weeks’ imprisonment, and on the other charges they were convicted and ordered to come up for sentence if called upon within twelve months, a condition being that each take out a prohibition order.