Dwayne Foster should have been serving three months for driving offences, but a bench warrant was never executed, writes Conor Lally.
Dwayne Foster had become a thorn in the side of gardaí in west Dublin in the course of his short drug-fuelled adult life.
The 24-year-old had escaped conviction for any serious offences but was a suspect in a series of major armed robberies, most of the proceeds of which were used to fund his cocaine and heroin habit.
One detective who knew him well described him as "vicious". The same source said the moment he heard Foster had been involved in the gun attack which claimed Donna Cleary's life, he knew who had pulled the trigger.
"He was the kind of guy that if you were going to search his house for guns or drugs, you wouldn't be going in without the Emergency Response Unit," the detective said.
"With some guys you'd feel that local armed detectives would be able to handle it, but Foster was not one of those. If he had a gun he would be the type that would use it."
At the time of his death he should have been serving a three- month sentence for driving without tax and insurance. He appealed the sentence in February, but did not turn up, and the appeal was struck out.
A bench warrant for his arrest to serve the sentence should have been executed after the appeal hearing on February 8th. This would have kept him in jail until about mid-April. However, the bench warrant was never executed.
Born on June 29th, 1981, Foster was reared at the family home at Woodbrook Avenue, Finglas, where he was still living until the time of his death at Coolock Garda station in the early hours of yesterday morning.
He was a young teenager when he first came to the attention of gardaí in Finglas. In the early days he was engaged in a variety of anti-social activity and was regularly involved in so-called "joyriding" around Finglas.
In his mid- to late teens he developed the first signs of a serious drugs habit. He first experimented with cannabis and then ecstasy, before progressing to heroin and cocaine by the time he was 20. By that stage his name had begun to crop up during the course of Garda investigations into serious armed crime.
He had become involved with a group of dangerous young armed criminals, mostly from Finglas and Blanchardstown. They specialised in armed robberies targeting cash-in- transit vans delivering money to ATM machines.
Gardaí very nearly caught Foster in the commission of one such crime in October 2002 when he and a number of associates tried to rob a cash-in- transit van in the Ballycoolin industrial estate near Blanchardstown.
He was arrested in the vicinity but was never prosecuted.
More recently he was suspected of involvement in the theft of €1.3 million from a cash-in-transit van in Bettystown in July 2004 as it was being unloaded into an ATM. In May 2004 he was also involved in a similar armed robbery on a cash-in-transit van which was targeted as it made an early-
morning delivery to a service station on the old Dublin-Belfast road at Lissenhall, during which about €250,000 was stolen.
Ironically, a number of criminals with whom he was involved have died recently.
Finglas man Declan Curran (24) died from drug-related complications in his cell at Cloverhill Prison, Dublin, in November 2004, while awaiting trial for armed robbery.
Another associate, Paul Cunningham (23), Mulhuddart, was shot dead at his family home just over a week after Curran's death. A third criminal associate of Foster, Anthony Spratt (32), also from Finglas, hanged himself in Mountjoy Prison exactly 12 months ago as he neared the end of a 12-month sentence for minor offences.