A LOUTH man has admitted killing Aidan Myers, who was attacked with a machete before being dragged along the road by a car, at the Central Criminal Court.
Angelo O’Riordan (23), Point Road, Bellurgan, Dundalk, Co Louth, had been on trial for the murder of Mr Myers (37) at Faughart, outside Dundalk, in December 2006. He had denied the charge, but yesterday, on day 19 of the trial, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, following his girlfriend’s evidence. The plea was accepted by the DPP.
The victim impact statements of Mr Myers’s family will be heard in November, when O’Riordan is sentenced.
It had been the prosecution’s case that O’Riordan was involved with a number of men in attacking Mr Myers and his friend, after ramming their car at Faughart shrine on December 12th, 2006.
The prosecution said that when Mr Myers and his friend, Gearóid O’Donnell, got out of the car, they were attacked with machetes. As the men lay injured on the road, O’Riordan got into a Mitsubishi Space Wagon he had earlier hijacked and rammed Mr O’Donnell’s Opel Astra, which moved forward, dragging Mr Myers under its wheels, the prosecution said.
Mr Myers died in hospital a few hours later after he had suffered three heart attacks.
Pauline Walley, prosecuting, described it as a “random attack of gratuitous and extreme violence”. In the absence of the jury, the court heard O’Riordan’s partner, Jennifer McBride, was arrested on suspicion of withholding information on the death of Mr Myers in December 2007.
During her interviews with gardaí, she told them O’Riordan had come home in the early hours of December 13th 2006, upset and looking for drink. He told her “something bad had happened earlier”. Ms McBride said she told him she didn’t want to hear any more. After that night, she said she heard gossip about Mr Myers’s death, but didn’t want to believe it.
However, in her live evidence to the court last Friday, Ms McBride said O’Riordan became upset that night because she was annoyed with him for being out late. She told the jury he began talking about his brother and said “bad things were always happening”.
Ms Walley asked Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy to rule that Ms McBride was a hostile witness, because of the discrepancies with what she had told gardaí.
Mr Justice McCarthy agreed, but before Ms Walley began her cross-examination of Ms McBride, Pádraig Dwyer, defending, told the jury that O’Riordan had given him new instructions.
O’Riordan then stood and pleaded not guilty to murder, but guilty to the manslaughter of Mr Myers. He also pleaded guilty to assaulting Mr O’Donnell.
He was remanded in custody to be sentenced on November 8th.