SHOOTING TRAGEDY

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20102, 8 May 1935, Page 6

SHOOTING TRAGEDY

FATHER AND SON FATALLY WOUNDED By Telegraph —Press Association HASTINGS, May 7. A tragic shooting accident occurred on Ohiti Lake, a few miles from Fernhill, yesterday, when Mr Harold Smith, a well-known land agent of Hastings, and his son Douglas, aged 17, were both mortally wounded through the accidental discharge of a gun. They were brought into Hastings by the Free Ambulance, and taken to the Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital, where they both later succumbed. Mr Smith late in the afternoon, and his son at 11.10 p.m. Few details of the accident are available, as there were no eyewitnesses, but Mr Holz, who went out with the ambulance, states that apparently Mr Smith, in getting out of the punt, seized by the muzzle a gun lying in the punt. By some means it discharged one of the two cartridges with which it was loaded. Smith Junior was shot in the right side of the abdomen. What happened in the next moment or two is not clear, but it appears that the father then went to pick up the same gun, also by the muzzle, and that the second cartridge discharged, and shot him through the right chest and lung. A man, who had been shooting alone on another part of the island, heard cries for help, and hurriedly rowed back to the homestead to summon aid.

The ambulance was unable to approach nearer than a mile and a half to the scene of the accident. The doctor and Mr Holz had to row in a punt to the island, and after an anaesthetic had been administered the victims were rowed back to the shore in a Maori canoe. With the assistance of some Maoris they were then carried a mile and a half to the ambulance. Mr Harold Smith had been in business in Hastings as a land and commission agent for 15 years, and was married to a daughter of the late Rev Mr Cockerill, a Church of England clergyman, in Hastings, and of the late Mrs Cockerill, who was killed in the earthquake in 1931. Douglas was the older of the two sons, who were the only children of the family.