SHOCKING TRAGEDY AT WEDDING PARTY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3621, 2 April 1927, Page 4

SHOCKING TRAGEDY AT WEDDING PARTY.

WOMAN SHOT DEAD. ALLEGED MURDERER SUICIDES. Gisborne, March 31. At about 8 o’clock to-night, while Mrs. Queenie Eleanor Pettit, a married woman, about 35, was talking in the diningroom of a friend’s house in Hireni Street, where a wedding celebration was in progress she was shot by a man outside the window. Two shots were tired with an American magazine rifle, and Mrs. Pettit collapsed into the ams of Dr. McSweeney, another guest, and died at once, one bullet having the effect, being flat-nosed, of tearing the muscles of the left arm, and the other entering under her right breast. __ , Immediately the startled crowd

heard the third shot, and the victim’s husband, rushing outside, met a man at the front door. He had blood'dripping from hisforchead and a gun in his hand, and was saying words to this effect: “111 fix them. I’ll shoot them.”

Mr. Pettit took the gun from tin man, who ran on to the road and disappeared. The police who were communicated with searched the scene. ’ Ten minutes later a fourth shot rang out in the locality. Two men coming down Harris Street found a man with his brains blown out am l a shot gun beside him. The man was identified as George Edward Nowell, aged 25. He is an Englishman, who has been in tin Dominion two or three years, and had a farm at Waikohu, but during the past two or three months has been living in a town boardinghouse. Nowell was a married man with a wife and child living at Auckland.

It is stated that the shots were intended for the young woman who was married that day, and that Mrs Pettit was shot in mistake. Mrs. Pettit was the wife of Michael Pettit, a well-known stock agent, residing at Waiuui Beach.