A TEENAGER who stabbed two mechanics in their heads had spent the day taking drugs and drinking alcohol and had been stabbed himself days earlier, his trial was told yesterday
Pawel Kalite (28) and Marius Szwajkos (27), both from Poland, sustained the stab wounds to their heads on February 23rd, 2008, outside their home on Benbulben Road, Drimnagh.
David Curran (19), Lissadel Green, Drimnagh, has pleaded not guilty to their murder but guilty to their manslaughter. Seán Keogh (21), Vincent Street West, Inchicore, has pleaded not guilty to the double murder.
Mr Curran’s barrister, Giollaíosa Ó Lideadha SC, said his client had been drinking vodka, smoking cannabis joints and taking Roche tablets (yellows and blues) while swimming in the canal that morning.
Mr Ó Lideadha was cross-examining a teenage girl, who was giving evidence by video link on the fifth day of the trial at the Central Criminal Court.
The girl, who cannot be named because of her age, was at the canal with both defendants, another teenage girl and a teenage boy, who also cannot be named. The barrister put it to her that Mr Curran and the unnamed boy were drinking the alcohol and taking the drugs.
“They would have been,” she said, explaining that she could not specifically remember but it would not have been unusual for them.
She could not remember seeing an injury on Mr Curran’s back when he was swimming in the canal, which his barrister said he got during a stabbing less than two days earlier. She agreed that the group met again about 3pm in a park and that it was possible that his client and Mr Keogh arrived with bags of alcopops, which Mr Curran and others drank.
“Yeah, more than likely,” she said. “Because it was nice out.”
She agreed that the two defendants left after about two hours.
“I remember them coming back with two bottles of wine they said they were after getting out of a moped,” she recalled.
The girl had earlier told John O’Kelly SC, prosecuting, that she and her friend tried to break up a fight between the unnamed boy and one of the Polish men that evening outside the chipper on Benbulben Road.
“Your man grabbed me by the hair and pulled me to the floor,” she said of the Polish man, later clarifying that she thought he had caught her while stumbling and that it wasn’t deliberate.
Another man broke up the fight and the Polish man walked towards his home, she said.
“We turned around and we just seen Schillaci and all running up screaming,” she said, referring to Mr Curran by his nickname.
“We could just hear him screaming: ‘He stabbed my Da’. I said: ‘He didn’t stab your Da.’ He didn’t really listen to me. He just kept running,” she continued.
She said he ran to where the Polish man lived and she and her friend followed.
“He ran up and one of the Polish men was outside his garden,” she recalled. “It looked like he was hitting him once and then he fell down. The other man ran from the door. He hit him twice.”
She said the screwdriver the gardaí showed her was not the one she had seen that day.
The trial continues.