A MAN has been jailed for life after being found guilty of “the brutal and pointless murder” of a young shop assistant who had shouted at his female companion outside a Galway nightclub.
Alexsander Nadowdny (28), Renmore Park, Galway, who is from Poland, had denied the murder of Kieran Cunningham (20) on June 2nd, 2009, following a night at Karma nightclub.
Mr Cunningham was standing near his friends when Nadowdny stabbed him three times in the space of six seconds, inflicting a 13cm deep wound to his heart.
His friends saw nothing of the attack and only noticed something was wrong when they saw he had collapsed in a pool of blood.
It took the jury at the Central Criminal Court just under three hours yesterday to unanimously find Nadowdny guilty of murder. He shook his head as Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy handed down the mandatory life sentence.
Mr Cunningham’s parents, Bernie and Donal, broke down in tears and embraced each other.
Outside the court, Mr Cunningham’s uncle Martin Cunningham said the verdict was the only one with which the family would have been happy. “Kieran was an absolute joker ... a little man with a big, big heart, he was a dote. There wasn’t a bad bone in his body so any other verdict would have cast aspersions on him.”
In his victim impact statement, Mr Cunningham had described how his nephew had been born prematurely, weighing 2lb, and how he had to fight for life. Kieran’s father made a pact with God that he would give up his “modest social life” for his son to live.
Mr Cunningham said Kieran’s parents could not come to terms with “how a so-called human being could stab their son for nothing more than having a laugh with his friends”.
Nadowdny’s attack on Mr Cunningham was captured on CCTV cameras and the footage shown to the jury during the seven-day trial.
Nadowdny took the witness stand as the trial was coming to a close, and told the jury he had been sitting outside Karma with his friend Jolanta Zlotnik and had been falling in and out of sleep because he was so drunk.
Ms Zlotnik woke him up, he said, and pointed out Mr Cunningham who was shouting and gesturing at her from across the street. Nadowdny said she showed him a knife in her handbag and told him “to do something” about it.
Nadowdny, a body-builder who had been on steroids, said he remembered walking across the road with the knife, but nothing more. He said he was too drunk to notice that Mr Cunningham was just over 153cm tall and weighed 59kg. He said he just wanted “to defend” Ms Zlotnik.
But Ms Zlotnik, who was the main prosecution witness in the trial, repeatedly denied that she had a knife that night or that Mr Cunningham had been harassing her. She said Nadowdny had got up without a word and approached the youth.
Two days after the attack, she went to gardaí.