SECOND BODY FOUND

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 179, 19 October 1927, Page 16

SECOND BODY FOUND

WOOLSTON TRAGEDY

LITTLE GIRL’S POIGNANT STORY (Special to THE SUN.) CHRISTCHURCH, Tuesday. “The old boat has gone this time. Jackie has gone too. Jackie drowned. He took the boat with two other boys.” TUHEN a breathless little girl of six. ** Mary Ann Downing, rushed up to Lawrence Taylor at Woolston on Monday, she told him the story of the drowning of her brother and two other boys in the Heathcote River, in those words. Taylor, in evidence at the inquest on one of the victims, George Eden, aged 9, to-day told the coroner how, having questioned the little girl, he went straight to the river bank, where he found evidence of what had happened. The footprints of the boys were clearly visible in the mud on the river bank. He immediately notified the police. The little girl, Mary Ann Downing, said she saw three boys, one of whom was her brother Jackie, take a boat lying on the bank of the river just below the tanks and paddle out into the stream. They rowed across to the other side of the river and were coming back, when the boat suddenly stopped and w r ent under. A formal verdict of death by drowning was returned.

The punt in which the boys made their fatal trip was recovered to-day upside-down and embedded in the mud of the river several chains down the stream from the scene of the accident. Dragging operations were resumed this morning, but it was not until shortly after six o’clock this evening that the body of John Downing, the eldest of the three boys, was recovered. There is still no trace of the body of Alexander Eden, the youngest of the victims.