JOSEPH Dwyer was a tragic figure, a drug user suffering from AIDS who had done well to survive until the age of 41.
According to his brother, James, Joseph was only six stone in weight and so weak from his illness he could "could hardly pick up a cup of tea".
None of those who knew him and spoke about him at Dolphin's Barn yesterday thought of him as a dealer. If he was selling drugs it was on a very small scale to feeds his own habit.
"He was harmless. He was pathetic," said one friend.
Joseph Dwyer had convictions for theft and in 1987 was given a four year sentence for drug dealing. But his brother insisted yesterday that Joseph had not been dealing recently.
"Only the people that are justifying themselves are going to say that," he said. He added that his brother's poverty made it obvious he was not a dealer. Joseph had only 87p in his pocket when he was attacked after leaving his flat to buy a can of Coke, his brother said.
"He hadn't even got a £5 electric card for his electricity meter," he said. "He hadn't been nicked for drugs in a long time. If you had a photograph of his flat you'd think he was a hobo. The man was living in squalor."
Joseph was known to other drug users who hang around Dolphin's Barn in the evenings, one of the areas in the city where drugs are known to be readily available. One witness yesterday said that Dwyer had come to the junction to "score" (buy drugs).
"If he came up to buy drugs in the Barn that doesn't justify him being killed," his brother said.
Joseph's wife, Betty, died three years ago. "She was delighted because she was losing weight and she said `I'm not on a diet or anything'," one woman at Fatima Mansions remembered yesterday. Someone had persuaded her to see a doctor. "Then she found out she was HIV."
His three children were staying with relatives yesterday.
Joseph Dwyer had been living in Fatima Mansions with a girlfriend but, his brother said, "a load of addicts moved into the flat and he was moved out over that".
However, he had not been warned by the vigilantes and had no idea he might be targeted by them, his brother said.