THE FAMILIES of two Polish men who were murdered in Dublin two years ago have described their pain and sense of loss following the deaths.
Pawel Kalite (28) and Marius Szwaijkos (27) were murdered by David Curran, then 17, outside their home on Benbulben Road, Drimnagh, south Dublin, in 2008.
Curran stabbed the two men with a screwdriver after a row outside a local chip shop of which he was not a part. Yesterday, Mr Justice Liam McKechnie sentenced Curran to life in prison for each of the murders.
Victim impact statements were read out in court by Alan Kennedy of Ace Autobody, where the two men had worked.
Mr Kalite’s parents said their son was lively and cheerful, with a “happy, true nature”.
He was honest and diligent and led a simple and peaceful life. He was determined to do his best, and to see the best in the world, they said.
“He didn’t know how to fight or how much cruelty and anger you have to have in yourself to take someone else’s life away,” they said.
He had spent his last holiday with his girlfriend skiing and they had planned to marry. He was to move home in June and two hours before his death had arranged to visit his aunt.
“All his dreams will remain unrealised, they will never have a chance to happen,” his parents said. The tragedy had left them with “the deepest scars” and with “a screwdriver” in their hearts.
What was keeping them alive was knowing his heart was still beating in somebody else, they said. The family of Mr Szwaijkos said nothing could change their pain, sadness and longing after the death.
Mr Szwaijkos was full of life, dreams, happiness and plans, they said, and was a “lovely and talented person”.
They described him as an honest, hard-working, unaggressive young man with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering who was doing his job with a true passion.
Every day for the two years he spent in Ireland he had called his parents. But all his plans and hopes had been destroyed in minutes.“We know that no matter what we do there always will be one person missing, a person that we would like to share our feelings and experiences with,” they said.
The family had gone through hell since his death, they said, and were still experiencing “many sleepless nights, enormous level of stress, headaches and an inability to feel any kind of joy”.
They said they would keep the 30-year-old Volkswagen Beetle Mr Szwaijkos restored.
When a stranger blew out the candle of life, “he killed a good man and he destroyed the lives of his parents, sister and family”, they said.
Outside the Central Criminal Court, Mr Kennedy, accompanied by Agnieszka Kalite, Mr Kalite’s sister, thanked the court and the jury for their verdict on behalf of the family.
He also thanked the people of Drimnagh who had supported them since the deaths as well as gardaí for “two years of hard work”.
“It is something to get a verdict, but for Marius’s family and Pawel’s family all they are left with are memories and heartache,” he said.
As Ms Kalite cried beside him, Mr Kennedy described the “two lovely guys” who had come to work for him.
“We’d invested in their training and they gave it back to us in spades,” he said.
He spoke emotionally of the suffering experienced by both men’s families since their deaths.
“Every day two dads go to a graveyard to keep two graves, they are beautiful graves, but what a sentence to have to go to your son’s grave,” he said.
“What a waste of life.”
