NATION FLU DEATH RIPS FAMILY’S HEART
FORMER Test cricket umpire Darrell Hair has avoided conviction after pleading guilty to stealing from his employer in what a magistrate called “a monumental fall from grace”.
Hair, 65, who stood in 78 Tests and is remembered for calling Sri Lanka spinner Muttiah Muralitharan for throwing in a Test in Melbourne in 1995, pleaded guilty in the Orange Local Court on Monday to one charge of embezzlement and one of stealing.
Hair stole $ 9005.75 from D’Aquino’s Liquor in Orange between February 25 and April 28. He blamed a gambling addiction. Hair’s lawyer Andrew Rolfe, described the offending as “an aberration” in a lifetime of service.
Magistrate Michael Allen did not record a conviction but sentenced Hair to an 18- month good behaviour bond. MADELINE Jones should have turned 19 this Sunday surrounded by her family and friends.
Instead her heartbroken loved ones are coming to grips with the sudden loss of the tiny blonde teen with an enormous heart after she died from complications with the flu during the worst influenza season on record.
Madeline, affectionately known as Maddy, had the world at her feet.
She was a talented tennis player who coached children, a law and business student at QUT, an animal lover who wanted to adopt every dog she saw and an adoring daughter, sister and girlfriend who was planning a bright future with her high school sweetheart.
“She was very funny, beautiful and very smart and she loved animals,” Maddy’s mum Danielle Nielsen said.
“She was a good girl and a good daughter, very dedicated and organised and very motherly to her twin brothers Nathan and Lachlan and everyone else in the family.
“Maddy was also very independent, very strong willed, very determined and that’s why she was going to make a great lawyer.”
Maddy started to show standard flu symptoms during a holiday with her boyfriend at Caloundra with a sore throat and runny nose – nothing serious enough to indicate the heartache that would follow.
Despite resting and taking every precaution, Maddy’s condition worsened and five days later she was admitted to the intensive care unit at the Prince Charles Hospital where she fell into a coma and never woke up.
Her devastated family said goodbye to the 18- year- old blue- eyed Eatons Hill girl at a service on Friday.
“She was very outgoing and loved life,” Maddy’s father Damian Jones said.
“She was very much an animal lover and volunteered for a bit at the RSPCA but she wanted to adopt every animal under the sun.”
For Maddy, the influenza turned deadly when she developed sepsis, organ failure caused by her body’s response to a joint attack of the flu and a bacterial infection.
“The doctors have explained to us that everyone in the family could have got the same thing but everyone would react to it differently,” Mr Jones said.
“The problem is the symptoms are just cold and flutype symptoms and different people react differently to the bacteria.”
Experts say the onset of sepsis is very difficult to predict among fit and healthy people such as Maddy and it’s unknown if everyone has the same level of risk.
This year’s flu jab has done little to stop Queensland’s worst flu season.
The vaccine was poorly matched to the strains of the virus, which rapidly spread throughout the state.