"I saw a body and a motorcycle being propelled through the air. It appeared the motorcycle hit the skip. . ."
That morning, Jennifer Knott says, she had asked her partner Daniel to take the day off work to stay with her and their eight-week-old daughter.
"But he said he couldn't because he would be leaving his boss high and dry," she says. "He said he would try and book a day off the following week.
"He fed and changed Holly and then put her back to bed. He went downstairs and he asked me for 20 quid and I said: 'No, you didn't even get me a Valentine's card.' He said he would get me one on Friday. We were messing, having a laugh . . . He came up to say goodbye in all his gear and said: 'I'll see you later'."
Jennifer stayed in bed and recalls hearing the revs of the moped outside growing gradually fainter as Daniel's beloved red Piaggio made its way along their street at Moatview Drive in Coolock, Dublin. It was about 7am.
Daniel Smith - originally from Manchester - had met Jennifer on a holiday in Greece in June 2002 and, after a few months travelling back and forth across the Irish Sea, he moved to Ireland later that year to be with her.
Turning his hand to anything that came his way, he worked mainly on the building sites of Dublin while planning for the sort of life that had eluded him in England.
Mr Smith had been taking heroin before they met, Jennifer says, but a course of methadone had been easing him gently off that crutch. His one lapse was nearly a fatal one: one day in September 2003, Jennifer had returned to their flat and found Daniel collapsed on the floor. He had overdosed and left a note for her, but she managed to get him to Beaumont Hospital in time to be saved.
"Once I had Adam [their first child], that changed him completely," says Jennifer. "He idolised him. He got a job about two weeks after the overdose and he never took a day off, not a sick day or holidays.
"Things were going great for me and Danny. We were only getting somewhere when the accident happened that took his life."
A few minutes before Daniel Smith set off on his moped on February 16th 2005, Brian Maguire left his house in Santry. It was still dark outside.
"When I reached the junction of Lorcan Crescent and Lorcan Avenue, I saw a body and a motorcycle being propelled through the air," he says. "It appeared the motorcycle hit the skip [on the road] to the right of centre.
"The bike and the person landed on the roadway in the middle of the road outside the creche. I stopped my car and got out; when I reached the person he was lying on his back. I guessed he was a male from his voice. He was in pain and moaning a lot."
About 45 minutes later, Jennifer Knott's mobile phone rang and she ran downstairs to answer it. It was a nurse from Beaumont Hospital. "Are you Daniel's next of kin?" she asked.
Mr Smith, who was 23, suffered severe injuries when a steel clothesline that protruded about eight inches from the edge of the yellow skip on the road hit his abdomen. He was taken to hospital, but was pronounced dead some two hours after the incident, a year ago tomorrow. His moped, which also struck the skip, had its handlebar entirely sheared off.
The autopsy found that he had severe internal bleeding and multiple injuries. He died from extensive blood loss due to a ruptured spleen and bruising around the heart, which deputy Dublin city coroner Dr Maria Colbert says would appear to have been caused by the pole. A toxicology report found no alcohol or other substances in his system.
The yellow skip had been left on the road the previous day. David Kenny, a self-employed builder, tells the inquest how some of his workers had placed the metal pole in the left-hand corner of the skip, but that it appeared the pole had been moved over towards the edge at the time of the crash. The pole was so firmly lodged in the skip that it took the strength of several gardaí to move it.
The jury, which returned a verdict of accidental death, recommended that reflectors be placed around the entire circumference of skips, while flags should be hung from any objects sticking out from these containers.
The Director of Public Prosecutions had previously directed that no criminal prosecutions be brought in connection with Daniel Smith's death.