GUNPOWDER DEATH

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 148, 20 December 1945, Page 11

GUNPOWDER DEATH

FATAL EXPERIMENT

P.A. AUCKLAND December 19. An inquest into the death of a schoolboy, George Thomas Bruce Orr, aged 14, who suffered fatal injuries while experimenting with gunpowder at a friend's place at One Tree Hill on November 29, was concluded before the City Coroner, Mr. A. Addison. The boy, who was a son of Mr. G. Orr, Maungakiekie Avenue, died at Green Lane Hospital shortly after the accident.

• Michael Andrews, a 13-year-old schoolboy, said he was in the same class at school as Orr, with whom he had been friendly for about a year. Some time previously witness learned how to make gunpowder from older boys who took chemistry at school. On the day of the accident Orr came to witness's place, bringing several discharged tommy-gun and aeroplanecannon cartridge cases with nim. "I mixed a quantity of potassium nitrate, potassium chlorate, sulphur, and charcoal together," witness continued. He had bought sulphur and nitrate from a chemist, and the chlorate from a firm in Queen Street. The charcoal was obtained from a fire they had had on Guy Fawkes night. He had no idea how much of each chemical was required to make gunpowder. When the gunpowder had been mixed Orr held the cartridge case while witness filled it, with powder through a paper funnel. Witness flattened the open end of the cartridge, after which Orr hammered the detonator end in order to bend the flattened end over to seal the cartridge securely. Orr was hammering the cartridge on a slab of steel lying on a bench, witness continued. "All of a sudden there was an explosion," he added. "I was standing alongside Bruce when it occurred. Nothing happened to me, but -something must have hit Bruce in the throat, because blood started to gush out of a wound in his neck." Witness and Orr intended to take the cartridge case full of gunpowder to an empty section near by, build a fire, and put the cartridge case in it to see how big an explosion it would make, he concluded.

Constable Duncan said all the cartridge cases produced in Court had been previously discharged and appeared to be of a type used by the American armed forces. Inquiries had failed to trace how they came to be in Orr's possession. The Coroner returned a verdict that the cause of death was shock and hemorrhage from the severing of the main artery of the neck, sustained while the boy was experimenting with gunpowder.