Posts Tagged ‘No Peace For Peter Roebuck: Writers Praise Him Before The Facts Of His Death Are Known’
No Peace For Peter Roebuck: Writers Praise Him Before The Facts Of His Death Are Known
RIP Peter Roebuck? He was 55. The former Somerset captain turned journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s The Age has died. He committed suicide by throwing himself from the balcony of a sixth-floor hotel room in Cape Town where he was staying while covering the ongoing Test series between South Africa and Australia.
He had been questioned about an alleged sexual assault. A detective and uniformed officer from Cape Town’s sexual crimes unit spoke to him at around 9pm after he returned to his room in the Southern Sun hotel. Roebuck reportedly became agitated and contacted a journalist about getting legal advice. One report says he jumped while police were still in the room. He landed on the hotel awning.
Colonel Vishnu Naidoo of the South African Police Services
“An inquest can take a long time, it can be anything from six months to two or three years, but what is critical here is to get the autopsy reports, or what we call the post-mortem report. We will be looking at that first and that can take four to six weeks, sometimes up to eight weeks. When we get that report, we can determine officially what his cause of death was. There is no crime suspected as far as Mr Roebuck’s death is concerned. If someone dies of unnatural causes and there isn’t suspicion of a crime being committed, then we conduct an inquest. In this time, we will undertake the normal investigation. We will take statements, we will await medical reports and that will form part of our investigation.”
The facts are not yet known. ButFairfax’s Greg Baum already knows:
He was tormented as only genius can be. The circumstances of his death attest to it.
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