SAD DROWNING FATALITY.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8386, 22 March 1907, Page 6

SAD DROWNING FATALITY.

By Telegraph—Press Association. 1 DUNEDIN, March 21. George Sandilands, of Balclutha, his wife and their child were capsized into the Molyneaux River last night. All three occupants of the vehicle> were drowned. LATER. Particulars of the drowning fatality have just come to hand, and show that Sandilands was returning to Balclutha from a visit to Kaitangata in a single buggy with his wife and child (twenty months old), when the vehicle fell over a steep bank on a narrow road into the river. The three were drowned. The mishap was witnessed by Mrs Morrison, a music-teacher, who was riding on horseback. Dragging for the bodies has been continued without success, but the horse is alive and the buggy has been rescued. In the buggy was found two bottles of whisky in a brown paper parcel. The couple were aged about thirty-five years, and had been a year in Balclutha. They formerly belonged to Dunedin. The Dunedin Star's Balcultha correspondent wires that the supposition is that the driver was intoxicated, and that the trap backed over the bank, the occupants being pitched out into the stream, which at the spot runs swift and deep. Sandilands was unfortunately addicted to drink.