Man sleeping on retaining wall falls to his death

Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­[email protected]

A re­lax­ing evening for a Moru­ga fam­i­ly turned trag­ic af­ter a 58-year-old man died af­ter falling 12 feet down a precipice in front of his home on Tues­day night.

Dead is Ral­phie Kadill, a heavy ma­chin­ery op­er­a­tor of Harp­er Trace, St Mary’s Vil­lage. Rel­a­tives be­lieve he may have fall­en asleep while ly­ing on a re­tain­ing wall and rolled over the edge.

In an in­ter­view yes­ter­day, his niece, Ruth Kadill, re­count­ed the events lead­ing up to the tragedy. She said be­fore the tragedy, she saw her un­cle lim­ing with his daugh­ter on a wall across the road from their home and ac­tu­al­ly sat with them for about an hour.

“Her dad was ly­ing down on the wall, and I guess he slept away,” she said.

She said she and her cousin (Kadill’s daugh­ter) left him there short­ly be­fore 8 pm. She said they tried to get him to leave but he didn’t want to.

“He was drunk and he did not have a sober mind to get up. We can’t tote him so we were wait­ing to see how long he would take to get up and come home.”

She said short­ly af­ter, Kadill’s daugh­ter asked her if she knew where he went and they be­gan look­ing for him.

“Usu­al­ly, if he lie down and he sleep­ing there he would get up and walk away...We did not know where he went. We went across to see if his slip­pers were there, we did not see his slip­pers and we check across the wall. He was down there. She (cousin) told me he was down there.”

Ruth then alert­ed oth­er rel­a­tives. She re­called that Kadill was un­re­spon­sive and blood was ooz­ing from his nose. She said they be­lieve he land­ed on his face be­cause there was a bruise on his fore­head.

Ruth said they called the am­bu­lance and tried to re­vive him as they wait­ed for help. How­ev­er, she said there was un­cer­tain­ty about where the am­bu­lance was com­ing from or when they would ar­rive. They then de­cid­ed to take him to the Princes Town Health Fa­cil­i­ty.

“We put him in a sheet, and they tote him up, straight in­to the ve­hi­cle and straight in­to the health cen­tre.”

Ruth said the area where her un­cle fell was com­mon­ly used by fam­i­ly mem­bers to re­lax.

“All of us would sit and lie down there, like nor­mal. No one ever fell off there be­fore,” she said, adding the fam­i­ly nev­er con­sid­ered the spot to be dan­ger­ous.

“It was nev­er some­thing we would think about to hap­pen.”

An au­top­sy is ex­pect­ed to be per­formed at the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre.

Moru­ga po­lice are con­tin­u­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to the in­ci­dent.