ALLEGED BRUTAL ASSAULT

Evening Star, Issue 17924, 21 March 1922, Page 3

ALLEGED BRUTAL ASSAULT

A RANGER KICKED AND BATTERED. HIS CONDITION DANGEROUS. Details have reached Te Kuiti of a particularly brutal and murderous assault which is alleged to have taken place at Kopaki on the night of March 18, when William Thirwell Routledge, a ranger of the Auckland Acclimatisation Society, was kicked and battered into an unconscious condition and then thrown into a creek. It appears that the perpetrators of the assault had taken possession of a case of whisky that afternoon, and that six bottles had been drunk prior to the assault. It is alleged that in their maddened condition they became obsessed with the ideathat Routledge, who was a stranger to the district, was a spy in the pay of the police. Routledge, on refusing an invitation to drink, was rushed by the four men and dragged out on the road. He was kicked and battered and rendered unconscious, dragged through two chains and a-half of blackberry, and thrown into a creek. Ho revived in the cold.water and scrambled up tho other side and hid in a wood pile. Ho heard the four men looking for him, and heard one of them say "He must be dead." Ho crawled for two miles and a-half to a farmhouse, where he arrived in a state of collapse and covered in blood. In response to a telephone message Sergeant Feamley and Constable Kennedy, accompanied by Di M'Rae, went to Kopaki, where tho victim was medicaid attended to and brought to Te Kuiti. He is in a dangerous condition, and is weak from loss of blood.

Herbert Holgate (a contractor), Richard Daly (a farmer, of Kopaki), Leonard Grundy and Alfred Glover (bushmen, of Aratoro) have been arrested on suspicion of being tho perpetrators of the assault. At the Magistrate's Court, Te Kuiti, yesterday, the four accused were remanded for seven days.