A man who had been living in Ireland under a false name died when his BMW car crashed through a bridge and landed on its roof in the river Boyne at Drogheda, the inquest into his death heard yesterday.
The coroner praised three gardaí who pulled the 21-year-old man from the car shortly after 3am on January 23rd this year and said they had given him some chance of survival.
The court heard he had been using the name Ainars Zarins and was only correctly identified by his uncle, Ion Culcinschi, who provided gardaí with his passport some 48 hours after the accident.
At the time of the accident it was first believed he was from one of the eastern European countries to have recently joined the enlarged European Union.
However, he was subsequently identified as Andrei Vasilita and was born in the Republic of Moldova. He had been living in Castle Ross, Dundalk.
An Italian man walking close to the Bridge of Peace about 3am said he saw the car - a BMW 520i - heading northwards and then heard a crashing sound and "a splashing sound" and saw the railings on the bridge had been crashed into.
He did not hear any screeching of tyres before the accident and no skid marks were found.
The gardaí managed to pull Mr Vasilita free from the car. A garda told coroner Ronan Maguire the car was on the river bank and half submerged. "It had gone straight through the railings," he said.
Mr Vasilita was last seen alive by two men who he had been drinking with in a house in Drogheda. It was believed he was sleeping over and they had not known he intended to drive back to Dundalk.
Staff at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda spent more than two hours trying to resuscitate him but a postmortem revealed he died from drowning. There were no other injuries suffered and the jury returned a verdict of accidental death.