"KEEP away from me, girls. I've got AIDS. Don't touch me". One of the young women who ran to help Joseph Dwyer as he lay in a pool of blood remembered his shouts yesterday, as he tried to make them keep their distance.
"He just kept shouting that. `Keep away from me, girls. I've got AIDS. Don't touch me. Don't touch me'."
An eyewitness to the beating of Mr Dwyer, she was with a group of friends at the Dolphin's Barn junction on Tuesday night when the incident began.
It started at about 9.30 p.m. when a group of men showed up, some of them in a white van. They were clearly recognisable in conversations with the drug users and as residents gathered at the scene yesterday, the same names kept cropping up. The leaders of the gang are known to be vigilantes and to have taken action against drug users and dealers before.
The vigilantes did not appear to have particular targets in mind on Tuesday night. "They were just coming up to clear the Barn. They've done it a few times before", said one man.
"I saw them coming, they had the van and a car as well. And they grabbed Josie. I think he just came up to score", said another witness.
Mr Dwyer (41) and his flatmate, Mr Alan Byrne (23), were told by the gang to move away from the area. One witness said that members of the gang started to hit Mr Byrne and that Mr Dwyer got him to move away. First they went to Fatima Mansions and then they headed back down towards Basin Street - or Basin Lane - where they lived.
The two men got as far as Basin Street when the gang suddenly went into what one man said was "a frenzy".
One woman said that there were between 15 and 20 people in the gang, mostly men. "There was two girls with them as well, and they stood at the end of the lane. They had both ends blocked off when they were battering him. They had sticks - y'know, baseball bats - and they had iron bars. I think one of them had a hammer."
The beating lasted several minutes and those who had run down, from Dolphin's Barn watched from the end of the lane.
"It was horrible, it was", the woman said. "We couldn't do anything, they wouldn't let us past. You could see them hitting him and battering him.
When it ended and the gang dispersed, those who had been watching ran up to Mr Dwyer and Mr Byrne. Mr Byrne seemed badly hurt, but Mr Dwyer was dying and worrying about people coming into contact with his blood. "He kept shouting `Don't touch me. Don't touch me'."
Mr Dwyer and Mr Byrne were taken by ambulance to St James's Hospital, where they were admitted to casualty at 10.05 p.m. The casualty unit called the Garda - the call appears to be the first the force knew about what had been happening in the area.
Mr Dwyer was pronounced dead at 11 p.m. Mr Byrne, whose injuries were relatively minor, was kept in hospital overnight and discharged yesterday morning.