SALESMAN KILLED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 January 1939, Page 5

SALESMAN KILLED

FALL FROM SIXTH FLOOR. HORRIFIED PEOPLE WITNESS TRAGEDY. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) AUCKLAND. January 26. In full view of a number of horrified spectators, a man fell from the sixth floor of the City Hotel late this afternoon to the pavement below and was killed instantly. He was Edgar Ronald Mackenzie, salesman, aged 27. of Aitken Terrace. Mount Albert, a married man with one child. Mackenzie had been sitting at a writing table in the lounge of the hotel. The only two other visitors in the lounge at the time saw him cross to the telephone box several times. One of the visitors left the lounge, and shortly afterward one of the lounge stewards saw Mackenzie on a settee with one leg through the window.

He made a dash across the lounge, but before he reached the window Mackenzie had disappeared. There was a balcony almost three feet wide immediately "below the window and one floor lower, but Mackenzie missed this and struck the footpath near the kerb, narrowly missing a motor-car parked in the roadway. He fell just outside the entrance to the public bar and in view of those inside. A man had entered from the street just a moment previously and was in the doorway when the fatality occurred.

People in another building in sight of the hotel witnessed the whole incident.

Mackenzie left a number of messages on the writing table in the hotel. One read: "To the management of this hotel. Please report this accident to 2 Aitken Terrace.” An ambulance was summoned, but Mackenzie had been killed outright in the fall.