Jury finds Slovakian guilty of manslaughter

The eight-day trial heard that the 33-year-old man died from a stab wound to the chest, which punctured the heart and a lung.

The other two occupants of the two-bedroom apartment were the main prosecution witnesses. The Slovakian couple did not say they saw Szabo kill the victim but that he had slammed the door on the victim’s hand not long before they found him collapsed in the hallway.

Eve Kocokova and Ladislav Nemecheck, explained that they used the bedroom with the ensuite bathroom; the accused had the second bedroom, in which he also cooked, and Mr Kwiatkowski slept on the couch.

Ms Kocokova said Szabo was in his bedroom when she left her partner and the deceased in the dining room that evening to get her coat. She noticed the light on in the bathroom that the accused and the victim shared.

She said she told Mr Kwiatkowski, and that he knocked on the bathroom door but there was nobody there. She said she heard him go to Mr Szabo’s room and ask why the light was on and then heard them arguing.

“Robert came back to the dining room after a while and showed that his hand was injured by Josef closing the door to his face,” she said through an interpreter. “He was in pain and he was upset.”

She said that Mr Kwiatkowski returned to the defendant’s bedroom and showed him his hand and that they argued again.

“We heard a noise when Josef threw Robert out of his room, something banged,” she said.

She said they ran out to the hall and saw the deceased lying face down on the floor. She said that he was going blue and there was blood coming from his mouth.

The couple said that Szabo came out of his room and helped Mr Nemecheck perform first aid to get his tongue out of his throat, while Ms Kocokova asked English-speaking neighbours to call an ambulance.

Mr Nemecheck said Szabo handed him a knife to puncture a hole in their flatmate’s windpipe, but he did not try this. He said he and his partner did not know Mr Kwiatkowski had been stabbed until a paramedic pulled up his t-shirt and he saw the wound.

The court heard that the hallway was covered in blood when the ambulance arrived but there was not much bleeding from the wound. Bleeding had ceased by the time he got to James Connolly Memorial Hospital a minute away and he was pronounced death shortly afterwards at 10.05pm.

Gardaí found blood in Szabo’s bedroom. Forensic scientists gave evidence that this was the victim’s blood and its pattern was consistent with his having bled by the bed and moved to or from the door.

Deputy State pathologist Dr Michael Curtis said Mr Kwiatkowski died of a single stab wound to the chest, which punctured his heart, one of his lungs and an artery.

Dr Curtis said the victim had no typical defensive injuries but had a bruise to the nose and a hand injury consistent with it having been trapped in a door, a scenario that was given to him.

He described the deceased as ‘grossly intoxicated’ and would have been obviously drunk, staggering and with slurred speech. The blood alcohol level he gave for him is more than three times the legal limit for drunk driving.

Szabo told gardaí he was in his bedroom when Mr Kwiatkowski began pushing in the door. He had a habit of walking in without knocking when drunk, he said.

“I pushed back hard and it hit him,” he said.

The defendant said he’d returned to his computer when he heard shouting. He opened his door and saw the victim lying down, vomiting. “Ladislav and I started first aid,” he said.

The jury of three women and nine men took two hours and seven minutes to reach a unanimous verdict of not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. It was just an hour since Mr Justice Barry White had given them the option of reaching this verdict.

The judge told the jury it was part of history, being the last jury to sit in that Four Courts courtroom as part of the Central Criminal Court. He remanded Szabo in custody until January 18 for sentencing at the new Courts of Criminal Justice about a kilometre away.