THE family of a senior Scottish academic was yesterday travelling to Hong Kong after he was killed in a road accident outside his home in the islands, which was witnessed by his teenage daughter.
Professor Julian Critchley, 50, died less than two hours after he was struck by a car as he rushed across a pedestrian crossing in torrential rain with his daughter Julia, 18, and her friend, early last Friday morning, in Tai Chung Kiu Road, near his home.
The driver of the car, a 27-year-old off-duty fire officer, joined the academic's daughter in a frantic battle to revive him as paramedics dashed to the scene.
He was taken to the Prince of Wales hospital, where he was treated for serious head injuries, but was pronounced dead at around 3am on Friday.
Local police said the car driver had passed a breathalyser test with a zero reading.
The academic, whose family lives in Loanhead, Midlothian, had worked at the Chinese University since 1989, and was head of the clinical pharmacology division, where he was a highly-regarded obesity and metabolic specialist.
Professor Critchley's wife Chris, a consultant lecturer in endocrinology and diabetes at Edinburgh University, was yesterday flying to Hong Kong with the couple's two sons, Bernard, 22, and Alexander, 13.
His family remained in Scotland to allow the couple's three children to continue their studies, but often travelled to Hong Kong to visit their father.
Julia, a medical student at Edinburgh University, had arrived on the island only days before the accident.
Neither she nor her friend were injured in the crash, which
happened at a busy junction.
Paying tribute to the Scots academic, Professor Sydney Chung Sheung-chee, dean of the faculty of medicine at the Chinese University, said: ''We all feel very sad. Professor Critchley was alarmed by an increase of diabetic patients in Hong Kong, so he devoted a lot of effort and time to the study of diabetes among Chinese people.
''His death is a big loss, not only to the university and the hospital, but also the medical field and the community.''
Professor Critchley was a highly-regarded figure within the special administrative region, where he acted as an adviser to police and the judiciary and was understood to have been instrumental in setting up the first drug and poisons information bureau.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article