A security guard was told by the coroner yesterday he should have tried to help a 12-year-old boy who had been electrocuted and was hanging upside down over a ladder.
Guard Lee Chun-fai told coroner Peter White he had felt 'incapable' of saving Primary Five student Cheuk Lee-hung, who hung on the ladder for at least 20 minutes before being lifted down by firemen.
But Mr White told him: 'You should have made an effort to make that person as comfortable as possible. If he was not dead, he might have suffered more severe injuries' from hanging upside down.
Lee-hung died at Nam Fung Sun Chuen, Quarry Bay, on May 26 last year when he was electrocuted after climbing the metal ladder to retrieve a football.
Mr Lee said that instead of lifting the boy down himself he had decided to wait for firemen and ambulance workers who arrived at the scene about five minutes after a report was made.
'My responsibility would be even bigger if I dropped the boy during the rescue,' he said. 'During the training course for security guards, we were told to wait for police to handle things if we were incapable of doing them.'
Lee-heung and his friends had been playing football for about 21/2 hours before the tragedy happened about 11.30am.
