A postmortem was carried out last night on the body of 24-year-old Derek O'Toole to determine the exact cause of death. Further details emerged yesterday of the circumstances in which Mr O'Toole was hit by a car containing four off-duty gardaí.
The collision took place at about 5am at a bend in the road in Lucan village as the car containing the gardaí was travelling westwards. The driver was in the vehicle with his garda girlfriend and a married couple who are also in the force.
All four live in the Lucan area. Three of them are based in Blanchardstown while the other is based at Garda Headquarters, Phoenix Park, Dublin. They had been at a gathering in a private house earlier in the evening.
According to Garda sources, when the driver rounded the bend in Lucan he saw something on the road which he initially thought was a sack. He swerved to avoid it but was unable to do so.
The car braked and when the four occupants looked back they realised they had hit a person lying in the road, according to the sources.
The car reversed immediately and the four gardaí attended to Mr O'Toole at the scene as they contacted the emergency services, Garda sources say.
The emergency services call was made at 5.11 am.
Mr O'Toole was taken to Connolly Hospital Blanchardstown were he died at about 7.30am.
He had been socialising in the Clondalkin and Ronanstown area on Saturday night and is understood by Garda sources to have gone back to the house of a female friend in the Lucan area. He had not long left that house when he was struck by the car.
His mother, Christine, said a young woman who Derek knew didn't have a taxi fare to get home. "He rang the taxi and got into the taxi with her."
While he was to have alighted at his own house, he travelled in the taxi with the girl to Lucan instead, she said.
She said that when she went to the hospital on Sunday, "the doctors and nurses there said that a taxi man had found him on the side of the road, rang the ambulances, rang the police and went through his phone numbers to find the number to ring the family".
"That's all we know. I want to meet the taxi man too who organised that," she added.
The garda's vehicle was impounded and was forensically tested throughout yesterday. Crash scene investigators also carried out an examination of the scene in Lucan throughout Sunday.
The garda who was arrested in connection with the incident was released after he passed the intoxyliser test.
He and his three colleagues who were in the car at the time have all since been interviewed by gardaí.
