A YOUNG man and woman have been jailed for three years each in connection with the death of a father of one, who was kicked and beaten at a 2007 Christmas Day party.
The victim’s brothers and sisters became upset when the five-year jail terms, with two years suspended, were handed down.
Louise Wall (22) and Michael Cruise (19) had originally gone on trial last July for the murder of Darren McKeown (29), but the State’s case against them collapsed when the trial judge ruled there was insufficient evidence to convict them of homicide.
It followed medical evidence that the principal cause of Mr McKeown’s death was a head injury caused when he fell and banged his head off concrete, after being pushed by a youth who was not on trial.
Wall, Cranmore, Clogherhead, Co Louth, and Cruise, Donore Avenue, Ballsgrove, Drogheda, denied murdering Mr McKeown, a barber at the alcohol- and drug-fuelled party in the Rowan Heights estate, Drogheda.
Following the trial’s collapse, they both pleaded guilty to violent disorder. In their interviews with gardaí, they admitted kicking Mr McKeown in the head.
Wall also admitted to hitting him in the head with a glass ashtray and stamping on his head and chest when he was lying on the ground outside the house. Cruise said he gave Mr McKeown, who he said was his “drinking buddy” two to three good kicks in the head.
A number of other youths are before the District Court in Drogheda in connection with the attack.
Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy described the attack as demeaning and extreme.
While he said Wall and Cruise were responsible for “significant injuries, not to mention the emotional impact and trauma on the deceased”, they were not responsible for the death.
He said he had taken into consideration the victim impact statement read to the court by Rachel McKeown, Mr McKeown’s sister, who described the “sorrow, anguish and pain” they still felt three years after Darren’s death.
She said their parents were suffering from depression and poor health, which her siblings attributed to the death of Darren, a “kind, honest and loving” person.
Mr Justice McCarthy said Wall and Cruise were the product of dysfunctional backgrounds. He referred to Wall’s very low IQ of 58, her alcohol problem and the fact that she was mostly illiterate.
Her three young children were taken into care weeks before the incident. Nevertheless, he said, there was evidence of a “hugely explicit kind that she was very violent with the ashtray inside the house and extremely violent outside the house”.
Mr Justice McCarthy said Cruise was only 17 at the time of the incident and he would not take into consideration his 31 convictions at the time for drugs possession and theft.
However, he would consider the fact that Cruise had lived most of his life on the streets, starting to drink when he was 10 and take cocaine when he was 13, having come from a broken family background.
Psychiatric reports stated that Cruise had an intellectual disability.
Mr Justice McCarthy said he felt it appropriate to jail both for three years each in the hope that time in jail would benefit the two, whom he said lived disorderly lives. The sentences for Wall and Cruise were backdated to April 2010 and October 2009 respectively.