Mouse Causes Death of Man

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 637, 13 April 1929, Page 9

Mouse Causes Death of Man

TRAGEDIES OF FATE THROAT CUT BY ICE Insignificant things often lead to death. Mr. T. H. Richardson, a Derbyshire auctioneer, died in the Derby infirmary following a fall over the banisters at the Unionist Club where he had been presiding at a dinner. He trod on a loose bootlace, stumbled, and fell 40 feet. Two women screamed when they saw a mouse in a Sheffield street. Their cries were indirectly responsible for the death of one man, and the serious injury of another. The men were corporation employees engaged in street-cleaning work with a motor-lorry, one being the driver. When the screams were heard, the driver jumped off the lorry and ran to the back of the vehicle. The lorry, which was on an incline, ran backwards and struck both men. One died almost immediately. The survivor, who was the driver, thinks that when he jumped out of the cab he caught one of the brakes and released it. As the. coroner remarked at the inquest, it is extraordinary that such a simple thing as a woman’s scream should lead to a man’s death, but lately Fate seems to have been in a particularly freakish . mood, and there have been a remarkable number of tragedies from causes that can only be described as queer. At a Middlesbrough inquest it was shown that a man at a local joinery works had been actually stabbed to death by machinery. He was working a spindle moulding machine, when one of the knives flew out, struck him in the neck, and inflicted such a wound that he died almost immediately. Murdered by Machine There was a similar tragedy at Sherborne, Gloucestershire: a 19-year-old youth was engaged in superintending a straw-tieing device attached to a threshing machine, when he stepped too close to the needles, one of which pierced his body with fatal results. A queer fatality that formed the subject of an inquest occurred at Liverpool. A young window cleaner, in his early twenties, was sitting up bed holding a lighted candle in order that his girl-wife could see to feed the baby, when he dozed off to sleep and the candle set fire to the bedclothes. The girl was so engrossed In her wifely duties that she failed to observe what had happened until her husband jumped out of bed with his nightshirt ablaze. He was so badly burned that he only lived a few hours.

A woman was found dead on Wimbledon Common with her throat cut, but no weapon that might have caused the wound could be found, and it was surmised that she had slipped and fallen on a jagged piece of ice with fatal results. In “cleating” a “flat” at Barnard’s Palace Theatre. Chatham, a stage hand. In casting the rope, jerked his head back with such force that he dislocated his neck and immediately dropped dead. Quite as remarkable was the cause of death in the case of a Cambridge under-graduate, whose lifeless body was found in a lock-up garage at Chesterton, a suburb of the college town. A Mrs. Pryor, living near the gar-' age, saw a man standing over the bonnet of a car, apparently examining the engine. An hour later she saw him in exactly the same position, and drew the attention of two postmen to the unusual occurrence. Investigating, they found the man was dead. He had been examining the engine while it was running and a woollen scarf he was wearing had caught in the mechanism and choked him to death.