The Coroner's Court: The October morning was overcast but dry, and the sun had barely risen in the sky as John O'Connor passed through Ballymakeera, Co Cork. It was 8.30am on a Monday morning, and there was scarcely another car on the road.
With his son in the back seat of the Skoda Octavia, he drove quite cautiously that day. The pointer on the dashboard read 30mph, and his dipped headlights were turned on, he recalls. They were travelling towards Cork.
As he approached the filling station at Ballymakeera, he could clearly see a man making his way slowly from the station towards the edge of the road. "He looked towards me," said Mr O'Connor. "I firmly believed he was stopping to let me pass."
On the footpath Seán Lucey - who was on his way to the filling station to buy his morning paper - noticed that John O'Riordan, an elderly neighbour whom he met here almost every morning, was about to walk straight into the oncoming Skoda's path.
Mr Lucey shouted a warning, but Mr O'Riordan only broke into a slight run as the Skoda loomed closer.
A short distance away Kevin Campbell was on his way from Cork to Killarney, and his was the only car driving in that direction. There might have been some mist in the air, and it was certainly dark, but this was an unremarkable morning, he said. To the right, he noticed that there was only one car - the Skoda - coming in the opposite direction.
But as the filling station drew closer, Mr Campbell saw what looked like a body - the distinctive, contorted shape of a man's body - projected into the air and collapsing in a heap on the ground. He slowed down and tried to take in what he had just seen.
"Everything seemed normal," he said. "Then I saw a body going into the air. It was unnatural. It caught my attention. I saw the man slip from the bonnet and fall to the ground."
Inside the Skoda, John O'Connor rammed his foot on to the brake, and the car shuddered to an abrupt stop. "He walked straight in front of my car. He was an elderly man. He came up the bonnet and then fell seven or eight feet in front of the car."
The man's body landed against the pillar of a house facing the road, his head taking the full impact of the fall.
Mr O'Connor and Mr Campbell both ran to where the old man had fallen. Mr O'Connor reached him first and tried to make him more comfortable by laying a towel between his head and the cold, hard surface.
A large gash marked the point where the man's head had been struck, and already he was unconscious.
Mr Campbell ran to a nearby house to find a blanket, and there he met a woman trying anxiously to make out what had happened on the road outside. Was it her brother? she asked anxiously.
Mr Campbell brought her inside and waited for the gardaí to arrive. Outside, a small crowd gathered around John O'Riordan, who lay as he landed for some 20 minutes until the ambulance arrived.
Eighty-year-old John O'Riordan died just after 5pm that day, October 3rd, 2005.
Before the incident he had just bought a newspaper and was returning to his home across the road, his routine for many years. At the inquest into his death, Cork City Coroner's Court heard that the autopsy showed he had suffered severe head injuries and multiple fractures of the skull, as well as contusions and swelling of the brain.
A Garda inspection of the car found that it was roadworthy and had been only slightly damaged by the impact.
When asked by coroner Dr Myra Cullinane, Seán Lucey and John O'Connor agreed that, although Mr O'Riordan appeared to have seen the Skoda, he had misjudged its distance. "I thought maybe he felt he would get to the other side of the road before I came," said Mr O'Connor.
No members of Mr O'Riordan's family attended the brief inquest, and the sparsely filled public gallery comprised only half a dozen gardaí and three witnesses. The jury returned a verdict of accidental death.
• This a series on road deaths and how they happen