The Coroner's Court: That evening Garda Louise Casey finished her shift at Ennistymon Garda station in Ennistymon, Co Clare, and set out for home at about 10pm. The November night was dry, driving conditions were good and she would have been travelling at about 30mph, she recalls.
As she passed St Michael's Terrace in Clarecastle, Garda Casey first took heed of the harsh glare of headlamps from a van behind looming wider in her rear-view mirror.
She drove on, trying to put some distance between herself and the van, but still it seemed to be tailing her, its driver clearly swinging erratically from one side of the road to the other.
The van would slow, then speed up again, taking bends at a high speed, its wheels straying on to the footpath. It was a red transport van, she could see. Had its driver lost all control?
"I drove on at this stage because I thought this van was going to hit me."
At Skehanagh Cross, Garda Casey pulled in to let the van pass.
Once it did so, she rejoined the road and tried to come close enough to note its number plate.
Then, just as they reached Hewitt's Hill at Knocknamanna, Clarecastle, the van veered one final time and crossed the white line, moving straight into the path of an oncoming car.
Events unfurled in an instant, all in front of her eyes.
With an immense bang that cut through the evening air, the two vehicles slammed together, bonnet to bonnet, the van coming to a rest on the left-hand side and the green car shunting to a stop a little further on, crumpled like a metal shell at the side of the road.
Louise Casey put her foot to the brake, pulled in and dialled for help and, with the mobile still to her ear, ran to the van in front.
"There was a man getting out of the driver's seat of the van. I asked him if he was okay and noticed that he was unsteady on his feet and I got a smell of alcohol off his breath when he spoke. He said to me, 'Is my van all right? I want to look at my van'."
He said his name was Norman. "What has happened?" he asked.
The green Volkswagen Passat had taken the brunt of the impact. A passer-by sat comforting its elderly driver, who was still conscious - if only barely - his head pushed back and blood running from his mouth.
"Norman said he wanted to touch him and get closer to him. He kept saying, 'Let me see him, let me see him'," says Garda Casey.
"I had to use all my strength to keep him back from the elderly man."
When help arrived, "Norman" - whose real name is John Hogan - was bundled into the patrol car. Garda Casey and a colleague returned to the old man, still trapped in his car.
"I checked for a pulse and it was weak. We were talking to the driver but he was just mumbling. There was blood coming from his mouth and his teeth had also left his mouth so he wasn't able to answer us. He just kept nodding as we kept talking to him. He kept slipping in and out of consciousness.
"Garda Curtin found a slip with the name 'Cahill' on it."
Such was the damage to John Cahill's car that the fire brigade had to cut away its roof to get him out. The 68-year-old, a lifelong non-drinker from Gort, Co Galway, was brought to Ennis General Hospital, but attempts to resuscitate him failed and, at 11.45pm on the same day, November 5th, 2004, he was pronounced dead.
When his wife Marie and son Ian arrived from Gort at 12.35am, they were too late. So was the victim's twin brother Joseph, whose first task was to identify John's body.
On July 29th last year, John Hogan (43) a carpenter with an address in Ennis, was jailed for three years for dangerous driving causing death.
Hogan had been separately convicted of drink driving only a day before the crash that killed John Cahill but, at his own request, his disqualification had been deferred for three months.
He refused to give a blood or urine sample to gardaí after the fatal crash, but he later admitted he had been drinking from about noon that Friday.