KEY POINTS:
A 12-year-old boy enjoying the last weekend of the school holidays by chasing wild goats on a hill farm died yesterday after plunging over a cliff.
Bradon Lee John McKie was running with his 10-year-old brother on the farm near the remote East Coast settlement of Kotemaori when he toppled over the 60m drop. His brother had to make his way out alone to raise the alarm at about noon.
Police from Wairoa and a rescue helicopter from Hastings carried, then winched, Bradon's body out of the gorge.
Kotemaori is in hill country about 45km from Wairoa.
A neighbour of the McKie family, Leonard Griffin, described Bradon as a friendly and mischievous kid - "a bit of a hard case". He said Bradon's parents worked on a dairy farm and he believed the boy also had two sisters.
Local children often chased wild goats on the hills around Kotemaori, he said. "There are heaps of wild goats round here. All the kids are into it. The land can be steep - but a 60m cliff? I don't know where he might have been playing."
The tragedy came on the last weekend of the school holidays. Griffin said tomorrow Bradon would have been taking the school bus to secondary school in Wairoa, about 35 minutes away.
"My young fella saw the police car rushing past and the ambulance. The kids are the same age as those boys. They'll be pretty upset."
