THREE MEN KILLED

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 151, 23 December 1938, Page 10

THREE MEN KILLED

CAR FALLS 300 FEET

TRAGEDY NEAR OPOTIKI

VICTIMS ON HOLIDAY

(By Telegraph— Press Association.)

AUCKLAND, December 22.

Three Public Works employees werp killed and the driver injured when the motor-car in which they were travelling left the road and plunged several hundred feet over .the cliff at Little Awanui Hill, Maeranui, about 15 miles from Opotiki, tonight.

Those killed were Charles Norden, Edward Ashley, Thomas Hughes.

The driver, whose name is Eddie Hitchener, aged 26, received a fractured arm.

The men were travelling to Opotiki for their holidays from the public works camp near Omaio. The twoseater car in which they were travelling left the roaa at a point where it skirts an almost perpendicular cliff about 500 feet down to the sea beach.

Apparently the car plunged down 300 feet and was caught in a tree. .The three men who were killed were flung out as the car rolled down.

A man and his wife were driving near the top of the hill when they saw a man crawling up towards the road. They took him to a Public Works Department camp in Maeranui and from there he was taken by car to the Opotiki Hospital where his condition is reported to be not serious.

Meanwhile the camp foreman, Mr. W. Nelson, and twelve men went to the scene of the tragedy, and with the use of long ropes were able to bring the bodies back to the road.

The police were notified and Sergeant J. Isbister and Dr. H. J. Mail, medical superintendent of the Opotiki Hospital, hurried to the scene, but the men were dead when they arrived.

The bodies were later brought to Opotiki.