Source : Perth Now news
A father who went looking for his son after he did not return home from work was met with an unimaginable scene at an Adelaide Hills worksite.
South Australian worker Josh Thomson-Parkin, 26, was found dead at a worksite in the Adelaide Hills after he failed to return home, sparking a SafeWork SA investigation.
The tragedy happened at Charleston on Tuesday, where Josh is understood to have been working with a commercial woodchipper.
When he still had not come home by 4.30am on Wednesday, his wife Mekayla raised the alarm. The couple had married only months earlier, in April.
Speaking to 7News, his father Max Parkin said he quickly sensed something was wrong and went searching for his son himself.
“I found him in that machine,” Mr Parkin said through tears.
Mr Parkin said Josh had spoken the night before about problems with the woodchipper, describing a machine that had been causing him grief throughout the day.
According to his father, Josh had been frustrated by the repeated trouble and was trying to deal with it while on the job.
The family believes the machine became blocked while Josh was working alone.
“It got clogged up and he was in the barrel cleaning it out and the barrel’s fallen on him … crushed him,” Mr Parkin said.
Josh’s parents are now demanding answers about why he appears to have been alone at the site and why nobody from his workplace realised he was missing.
Mr Parkin said he could not understand why he, rather than Josh’s employer, was the one who found him.
“Why were there no workers there to make sure he finished work,” he said.
Mechanical Vegetation Solutions has not commented publicly on the circumstances, stating only that it would not respond while the SafeWork SA investigation is underway.
As the investigation continues, Josh’s family is remembering a young man they say was deeply loved and impossible not to be proud of. His mother, Tanya, described him as “The best son you could ever ask for”.
“When he was little … I always used to say, if you could pick your kid, you couldn’t have picked a better one,” she said.
