A 17-YEAR-OLD plunged to his death early yesterday while trying to get into a holiday apartment he was sharing with friends.
Joseph Olwill from Shanliss Way, Santry, Dublin, and a student at St Aidan’s CBS in Collins Avenue, slipped and fell 12m (40ft) from the top of the three-storey Tyrconnell Apartments building in Bundoran, Co Donegal, at about 2.30am.
A security man from the nearby Paris nightclub attempted to resuscitate him, but he was subsequently pronounced dead by a local doctor.
The teenager, who was the youngest in a family of four, was one of a group of 12 to 14 boys and girls, mainly in their late teens, who had been renting two apartments for the past week and had been due to return home yesterday.
A number of them had been attending a local surfing school.
Gardaí said most of the group were in one apartment within the building until about 2.30am, when three or four individuals had gone out into a corridor to enter the other apartment.
They discovered the door was locked and could not find a key. Two of the group left and procured a master key.
Joseph, however, remained on the third-floor corridor and decided to climb on to the roof to get into his apartment through an open window.
He climbed on to the wet roof and was on his way down the opposite side when he fell.
His older brother, who was on holiday with him, was asleep at the time.
The teenager’s father Patrick, a civil servant, and his mother Anne have travelled to Bundoran.
A holidaymaker from Belfast, Marguerite Beattie, witnessed the fall from a house opposite the apartments.
She alerted her partner, Chris Torbitt, who saw some youths and a girl shouting from an apartment window.
“The young men were shouting to him to move, to get his body moving; the young girl was shouting from the window. They were screaming, ‘Joe, Joe, move, move a foot, move your body’. ”
They were desperately trying to establish that he was still alive, she added.
“I shouted across the street that they should phone an ambulance and they said they had already done that.
“Then the two young men went away, probably back to their building, and returned with a duvet.
“One of them used that to climb across barbed wire that goes over the top of the locked gate. It was a hard job but he made it.”
Bundoran town mayor Michael McMahon said: “He was a young man enjoying his holiday and it was his last day before returning to Dublin to prepare for a return to school.
“People are absolutely stunned here.”