Accused 'was drinking and taking drugs' on day of double stabbing
A teenager who stabbed two mechanics in their heads had spent the day taking drugs and drinking alcohol and had been stabbed himself days earlier.
Polish men Pawel Kalite (aged 28) and Marius Szwajkos (aged 27) sustained the stab wounds to their brains on February 23, 2008 outside their home on Benbulben Road, Drimnagh.
David Curran (aged 19) of Lissadel Green, Drimnagh has pleaded not guilty to their murder but guilty to their manslaughter. His 21-year-old co-accused, Seán Keogh of Vincent Street West, Inchicore pleaded not guilty to the double murder.
David Curran’s barrister, Giollaiosa O Lideadha SC, said his client had been drinking vodka, smoking cannabis joints and taking Roche tablets (yellows and blues) while swimming in the canal that morning.
Mr O Lideadha was cross-examining a teenaged girl, who was giving evidence by video link on the fifth day of the trial at the Central Criminal Court.
The girl, who cannot be named because of her age, was at the canal with both defendants, another teenaged girl and a teenaged boy, who also cannot be named.
The barrister put it to her that David Curran and the unnamed boy were drinking the alcohol and taking the drugs.
“They would have been,” she said, explaining that she could not specifically remember but that it would not have been unusual for them.
She could not remember seeing an injury on David Curran’s back when he was swimming in the canal, which his barrister said he got during a stabbing less than two days earlier.
She agreed that the group met again about 3pm in a park and that it was possible that his client and Sean Keogh arrived with bags of alcopops, which David Curran and others drank.
“Yeah, more than likely,” she said. “Because it was nice out.”
She agreed that the two defendants left after about two hours.
“I remember them coming back with two bottles of wine they said they were after getting out of a moped,” she recalled. She and the other unnamed teenagers later left for the chipper on Benbulben Road, she said.
The girl had earlier told John O’Kelly SC, prosecuting, that she and her friend tried to break up a fight between the unnamed boy and one of the Polish men that evening outside the chipper.
“Your man grabbed me by the hair and pulled me to the floor,” she said of the Polish man, later clarifying that she thought he had caught her while stumbling and that it wasn’t deliberate.
Another man broke up the fight and the Polish man walked towards his home, she said.
“We turned around and we just seen Schilaci and all running up screaming,” she said, referring to David Curran by his nick name.
“We could just hear him screaming: ‘He stabbed my Da’. I said: ‘He didn’t stab your Da.’ He didn’t really listen to me. He just kept running,” she continued.
“He was caught in the moment. He wasn’t even looking at me. He just wanted to go up,” she said later under cross examination, when put to her that David Curran didn’t remember being told he was wrong about his father being stabbed.
She said he ran to where the Polish man lived and she and her friend followed.
“He ran up and one of the Polish men was outside his garden,” she recalled. “It looked like he was hitting him once and then he fell down. The other man ran from the door. He hit him twice.”
She later said she might have mixed up about which of the men David Curran hit twice.
“He certainly stabbed one of them twice,” she said.
She said that both she and her friend were crying at this stage and ran away. She said she did not make any phone calls, either at the chipper or at the house. She added that the screw driver the gardaí showed her was not the one she had seen that day.
The trial continues before Mr Justice Liam McKechnie and a jury of eight women and four men.
