Man jailed for nine years for killing housemate with meat factory knife after row over poker game

Justice Tara Burns also said that a ‘very sad’ picture had been painted of both men, and wondered why they would leave their homeland to live here, do the unpleasant work they did and spend their spare time drinking and gambling.

She was speaking today as she sentenced the 39-year-old, whom a jury cleared of murder but convicted of manslaughter with the knife from the factory’s ‘kill floor’.

Tomasz Paszkiewicz had told gardai that he didn’t have any thoughts in his brain at the time, and the defence argued that this showed lack of the intent necessary for murder.

He had pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to the manslaughter of fellow Polish man Marek Swider (40) outside their home on Dublin Street, Ballyjamesduff, Co Cavan on January 1, 2018.

The pig farm worker died of two stab wounds to his upper body.

Justice Burns noted that both men were from the same town in Poland and knew each other since they were young men.

The accused had worked in a meat factory here, where his job was a deboner, which consisted of taking the meat off the animal’s head. He had been issued with a special deboner knife, she said.

“One can assume that this was a very sharp knife and that the accused had an expertise in using it,” she said.

She recalled that the deceased had won a lot of money from the accused in a poker game that night.

“The accused was unhappy with how things had gone. He stood up and picked up the money,” she continued. “The deceased objected.”

She recalled that the accused had asked the deceased to go outside and that they had left through the kitchen.

“In the course of this, the accused obtained his work knife from the kitchen,” she said.

She noted that he had said in interviews that he didn’t intend to kill him, and that ‘a power’ had moved his hand.

“The picture painted for both of these men is very sad,” she said.

One wonders why they would leave their homeland to come here,... do the unpleasant work they did and then spend their time drinking and gambling.

A notable aggravating factor was that the killing had involved ‘an extremely dangerous knife, of which the accused had expert knowledge’.

She agreed with the State that it fell into the serious category of offences of this kind and she found that a headline sentence of 13 years was appropriate.

However, she reduced this to nine years in light of his guilty plea, other mitigating factors and his personal circumstances.

Sean Guerin SC, prosecuting, had last week read out a victim impact statement prepared by Mr Swider’s mother, Jozefa Swider, and sister, Urszula Swider. They did not attend the trial or sentence hearing.

They wrote that a part of their family was taken away from them on the night their son and brother was killed. They had always wondered why and continued to wonder every time they prayed together.

They asked why God’s law of ‘Do Not Kill’ had been replaced.

They said that it was difficult to put into words the huge sadness and grief they felt during piercing nostalgic moments. However, they lived with a sense of hope that they would all meet in one place again one day.

Paskiewicz then entered the witness box. Dressed in a lime-coloured shirt, he told his barrister, Kenneth Fogarty SC, that he was really sorry for taking Mr Swider’s life.

“I never intended to cause any harm to him. I want to apologise to his family,” he said. “I took his life. I’m fully responsible for that.”

He testified that he regretted very much what he did and wanted to apologise to his own family too.

The defendant said that his actions had also had a huge impact on the small Polish town where they were both from.

“I gave a lot of suffering, a lot of pain to a lot of people in my hometown,” he explained.

Paskiewicz stated that it was hard to find the right words to describe how badly he felt.

“Human life is priceless and everybody deserves to be happy,” he said.

I’m very ashamed of what I did to him… I’m ashamed that my actions took his life.

Mr Fogarty asked him how often he thought of Mr Swider.

“Every single day,” he replied, adding that his apology was sincere.

Mr Guerin told the judge that it was the DPP’s submission that this was a ‘high-culpability case’ due to a number of aggravating factors.

These included that there had been a confrontation involving a potentially-lethal weapon with which the accused was very familiar; the accused either ‘was or ought to have been’ aware of the risk of serious injury; the deceased was stabbed twice; there was no provocation or self defence; the deceased had very little opportunity to defend himself; the confrontation was initiated by the accused as a result of losing money at cards; and the accused had left the scene without taking any care of the deceased, something that might be described as callousness towards his victim.

However, Mr Fogarty urged the court to view the killing as a medium-culpability case. He asked the court to take into consideration mitigating factors, including his guilty plea, lack of any previous convictions, evidence of remorse, his asking to be arrested and full cooperation with the investigation.

“He asked me not to plead for leniency in the real sense of the word,” said the barrister. “But I ask you to provide some light at the end of the tunnel.”

Evidence at trial

Mr Paskiewicz made a number of admissions on the opening day of his trial. These included that the he had invited the deceased outside following a row that erupted while the two were playing poker at their home.

When outside, he said, he stabbed the deceased with a knife issued to him for his work on the ‘kill floor’ at Liffey Meats in the town.

A Czech friend of the deceased was visiting that evening and testified that there had been a friendly atmosphere until the incident.

Zdenek Hebron told the trial that the deceased had won all the money, but that the accused had grabbed it and put it into his pocket. The deceased had said: ‘Wait, that’s all my money. I won them’.

Mr Hebron testified that the accused then told the deceased to follow him outside. They both left the living room and nobody returned until about five minutes later, when the deceased came back in ‘holding his tummy’.

“He said: ‘That stupid guy stabbed me. Call ambulance’,” recalled the witness.

Mr Swider underwent surgery but died on New Year’s morning. A post-mortem exam found that he died of two stab wounds, one to the chest and one to the abdomen.

The boning knife, engraved with Mr Paskiewicz’s employee number, was discovered at the scene, but the accused was nowhere to be found. He was crisscrossing the country by bus and eventually walked into a garda station in Cork City.

The garda on duty thought he was joking when he asked to be arrested for kiling a man three days earlier.

“We played cards. I drink a lot of vodka. I lost €500. I went crazy. I took this money and left. He followed me,” he’d said.

I don’t know how I had the knife in my hand. We were talking. Then I took the knife and pushed.

Cavan Gardai travelled to Cork to interview him and he agreed with them that he had become proficient with a knife from years of boning cows’ heads in the meat plant.

“I have to open the cow’s head and cut off the cheeks. That is all I do,” he explained.

He said that he did not remember going into the kitchen for the knife on the night of the killing, but said that he probably did.

He was asked what was going through his head when he was standing outside, face to face with the deceased, ‘knife in your hand and you stab him twice’.

“This is not me. Power move my hand over. I don’t decide I go stab him,” he replied.

“I look at his face but I don’t see his face... I don't have any thoughts in my brain. I not decide move my hand to stab him.”

Ken Fogarty SC, defending, argued in his closing speech that this showed lack of intent.

“I do say respectfully they (the prosecution) haven’t made out the case of intent sufficient to move this from a charge of manslaughter to murder,” he said.

However, prosecutor Sean Guerin SC, said that the story of Mr Swider’s death was a very simple one.

“A man, who got drunk playing cards for money, lost his money and became angry with the man who won the money from him. He tried to take it back and was rebuffed,” he began.

“In his anger and covetousness for that money, he brought that man outside, armed himself with the knife and gave Marek Swider no chance.

There was no fight. There was barely even an argument. Mr Swider didn’t lay an arm on him and barely had an opportunity to defend himself.

The barrister described it as ‘an efficient and brutally effective killing’.

Ms Justice Tara Burns charged the seven men and five women of the jury, explaining that the interpretation of what the accused said to gardai was completely a matter for them. However, she said that the issue of intent did arise in interviews and that this was really the issue in the case.

She referred them to the answer he gave gardai when they asked him what was going through his head.

She said that they should acquit of murder if they accepted that the accused was saying that he didn’t have the intent, and if they accepted that to be true.

Following almost five hours of deliberations, the jury reached a majority verdict of not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter.