'Murder suspect's' wife weeps as she recalls wrongful arrest
The wife of a man wrongly arrested as a murder suspect wept today as she told the Morris Tribunal their lives have been shattered and destroyed by his arrest.
Patricia McBrearty said she will never again have the luxury of having a normal life since Frank McBrearty Jnr was accused of killing a local cattle dealer.
She said her husband’s health has suffered and their children were badly affected by watching their father arrested while he brought them to school.
Mrs McBrearty described how her children were screaming and hysterical when they were brought home by gardai on the morning of December 4, 1996, with her seven-year-old boy on the verge of suffering an asthma attack.
“They were screaming and crying,” she said. “I was shocked.”
Mrs McBrearty told the hearing her son said gardai told him his daddy was a murderer.
The youngster also complained that during the arrest he got out of the car and was running over to his dad when a policeman caught him around the neck and pulled him back, put him into the back of the car with his sister and locked the door.
Gardai believed Mr McBrearty Jnr and his cousin Mark McConnell had killed Richie Barron two months earlier. It was later ruled Mr Barron was the victim of a hit-and-run. No-one has ever been charged in relation to his death.
Mrs McBrearty, who at the time was recovering from surgery to remove a gallbladder and had a four-month-old baby, told the tribunal she moved from the UK to Donegal in 1993 to raise her children in a better environment.
She said on the day of her husband’s arrest she followed him to Letterkenny Garda Station to try and see him and complain about her children’s treatment, but claims Superintendent John Fitzgerald ushered her out of the station, telling her she could come back and complain any other day.
Mrs McBrearty said later that evening a woman arrived at her door claiming to be a district nurse.
“I was ashamed my husband had been arrested for murder,” she said. “I was embarrassed.
“She was asking quite a lot about the older children. After she left my sister commented that she wasn’t a district nurse, that it must have been a ban garda. That she had a sick child and couldn’t have got a district nurse out at that time of the evening if she tried.”
Following his release Mr McBrearty told his wife he had been tortured while in custody, accusing gardai of hitting and slapping him, poking him with a pen, and showing him graphic autopsy pictures of blood pouring out of Mr Barron’s head.
Mrs McBrearty said her complaints to gardai and the Garda Complaints Board that her children were treated like animals were not dealt with.
She then told tribunal chairman, Mr Justice Frederick Morris, he was to blame for the decline in her husband’s health as he was not represented legally at the tribunal.
“People think we should be thankful for your reports bringing out some of the wrongdoing,” Mrs McBrearty said. “But the whole truth has not come out.
“We have been accused of the unthinkable at the hands of the most powerful people in this land, and I don’t only mean the gardai.
“This should never have happened to us. Our children should never have been abused by these people.
“We are the victims here.”
The Morris Tribunal, which is investigating garda corruption in Donegal, is currently hearing claims some 12 people – many related to the McBrearty family - were interrogated, intimidated and abused during the botched death probe.
