The triple murderer, Brendan O'Donnell, died in Dublin's Central Mental Hospital due to heart failure associated with a drug he was receiving, an inquest jury has found.
The 23-year-old Clare man suffered a rare reaction to the anti-psychotic drug of which he had received a normal dose, Dublin City Coroner's Court was told yesterday. The jury returned a verdict of death by misadventure.
O`Donnell, who was serving life imprisonment for the 1994 murders of Imelda Riney (29), her son Liam (3), and Father Joe Walsh (37), was found unconscious in his cell at the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum at 8.20 a.m. on July 24th. Efforts by staff to resuscitate him failed and he was pronounced dead at St Vincent's Hospital less than an hour later.
The day before he died, O'Donnell had been confined to his cell following a self-inflicted arm injury. A care officer at the Central Mental Hospital said he gave O'Donnell his medication at about 9 p.m. the night before his death and checked him hourly; he appeared to be asleep.
O'Donnell's father, Michael, his grandmother, Mrs Mary Quinn, and sister, Anne-Marie, attended yesterday's inquest. Mrs Quinn and Anne-Marie sat apart from Mr O'Donnell and left the court as the State Pathologist, Dr John Harbison, was giving evidence.
O'Donnell was described by hospital staff as very tense and unhappy with "a lot of notions of self-destruction" and a history of deliberate self-harm including self-imposed periods of starvation.
He had been in the Central Mental Hospital for about a year following his transfer from Arbour Hill prison after an unprovoked assault on another inmate.
The hospital's medical director, Dr Charles Smith, said O'Donnell was one of the most complicated and problematic patients he had dealt with. He was constantly at war, he had expressed suicidal thoughts and was impulsive. He regularly presented with "bizarre" physical complaints, including claiming that he was paralysed from the waist down or had to talk through clenched teeth. He had been on various medications, none of which affected his mental state "in any beneficial way".
Dr Smith said O'Donnell's dosage of the anti-psychotic drug Thioridazine was "definitely within the known and accepted safety range". He had received the same drug six months before without any recorded side-effects.
Dr Harbison said O'Donnell died of heart failure caused by the fatal intoxication of Thioridazine.
The level of the drug in his blood during the post-mortem was just above the therapeutic range.
Thioridazine had been found previously to have caused sudden unexplained deaths at levels below those detected in O'Donnell's blood. There was an element of "idiosyncracy" in the reaction of people to this type of drug.
The Dublin City Coroner, Dr Brian Farrell, expressed his sympathy for O'Donnell's relatives. He said he also wished to remember those other families "deeply traumatised" by the circumstances of O'Donnell's life "in what was a profound tragedy which affected us all".