LOCK-UP FATALITY

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 64, 13 September 1926, Page 6

LOCK-UP FATALITY

EXTRAORDINARY ACCIDENT.

While looking through the peep-hole of the cell at the Petone Police fetation, into which he had been placed on Saturday afternoon, after being arrested on a charge of drunkenness, Stanley Murphy, aged 21, caught hi-i head in the aperture. The pan on which he was standing slipped from underneath his feet and he was strangled to death.

Murphy was a single man and resided with his mother at 2, Gear street, Petone. He had been in New Zealand only three years, and was employed by New Zealand Standard Porcelains, Ltd. The deceased was arrested by Constable M'Namara at 4.50 p.m., and taken to the lock-up. The constable visited him in the cell at 6.30,. when he was all right, but when Senior-Sergeant M'Telvey went there twenty minutes later he found the young man had caught his head it the hole. Considerable difficulty was experienced in extricating him, and all attempts at artificial respiration failed, and a doctor who was called found that he was dead.

An inquest will be held in Wellington on Wednesday afternoon.