A woman told a court how she tried to fight off an intruder who broke into her bedroom in the middle of the night, as she feared what he would do to her young daughter if he managed to knock her unconscious.<\/p>\n
The woman told garda\u00ed she believed the man (33) was trying to knock her out so that he could sexually assault her teenage daughter who was sleeping with her in the room of their Co Cork home.<\/p>\n
The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, pleaded guilty to aggravated sexual assault of the woman, physical assault causing harm to both her and her daughter, false imprisonment of both of them and burglary at their home in Co Cork on January 12th, 2025.<\/p>\n
Det Garda Paul Cullen of the Cork County Protective Services Unit told Ms Justice Siobhan Lankford at the Central Criminal Court sitting in Cork that garda\u00ed were called to the house after a neighbour raised the alarm at 4.58am when she heard the teenage girl screaming for help.<\/p>\n
The neighbour ran out to help the girl who told her \u201cthere is a man beating my mam, that she and her mam were asleep in bed when a man came into their bedroom and started beating us\u201d. The court heard that when the neighbour went to the woman\u2019s house, she was hysterical and looking for her daughter.<\/p>\n
Det Garda Cullen said the woman told garda\u00ed that she woke up to hear their dog \u201cskittering\u201d and she realised there was a man in the room. She said she kicked out but the man started grappling with her and sexually assaulted her through her pyjamas.<\/p>\n
The man punched her repeatedly in the forehead and left side of the face \u2013 so much she thought he was trying to knock her out, the court heard. He stopped punching her when he saw her daughter trying to escape and he followed the girl out on to the landing, Det Garda Cullen told the court. <\/p>\n
The garda said the woman picked up a hurley that she had in the bedroom and struck the man on the head.<\/p>\n
He fell down and she went downstairs to try and find her daughter who had fled the house.<\/p>\n
A male neighbour called and found the intruder hiding in a green area and pointed him out to garda\u00ed when they arrived. The man was arrested at the scene. <\/p>\n
In a victim-impact statement, the woman said there were no words to convey the devastating impact that the man\u2019s invasion of her home and violation of her body had on her. She was haunted by what happened that night.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am constantly trying to block out flashbacks. I don\u2019t feel safe anywhere \u2013 I am now terrified of the dark, something I had never experienced or understood before \u2013 I am terrified of getting into my car in the dark, checking to see if there is a man following me \u2013 I am scared all the time now.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t even want to think about or share with anyone how I physically feel sick, dirty and ashamed, violated and I want to puke when I think about what happened to me in front of my daughter. There is no amount of showering I can do to make myself feel clean again.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel disgusted and don\u2019t feel my body is my own, that a part of me has been taken and I don\u2019t know will I ever feel normal again. Something has changed in me forever and I feel so sad this has happened \u2013 all I try to do is get through the day as best I can and stay strong for my daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n
The woman\u2019s daughter told in her victim-impact statement how she can\u2019t walk anywhere in the dark on her own without fearing something is going to happen to her while she also found it very difficult to live with the memory of what happened that night.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that he broke into our house … where I am supposed to be safe makes me even more scared about what can happen in other places. Now, I don\u2019t feel safe in my own house so I can\u2019t have friends over for sleepovers and I can\u2019t sleep in my friend\u2019s house.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI have also developed really bad trust issues with adults … when people say everything is going to be okay and nothing is ever going to happen to me, I automatically assume that what they are saying is lies because something bad did happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Det Garda Cullen said the accused had a previous conviction for rape and was on bail for that offence when he broke into the woman\u2019s home. He is currently serving a sentence of more than 10 years for the earlier rape offence, he said.<\/p>\n
Defence counsel Donal O\u2019Sullivan SC pleaded for leniency, pointing out his client had entered a signed guilty plea at the first available opportunity, expressed remorse and while he had a previous conviction for rape, he had committed no such sexual crimes until he turned 31.<\/p>\n
Ms Justice Lankford commended the mother and her daughter for their courage but said she wanted time to consider the appropriate penalty. She adjourned the case until January 23rd for sentence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A woman told a court how she tried to fight off an intruder who broke into her bedroom…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213628,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[19620,9,10,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,1109,5,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-237123","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-bob","9":"tag-breaking-news","10":"tag-breakingnews","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-featured-news","13":"tag-featurednews","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-latest-news","18":"tag-latestnews","19":"tag-main-news","20":"tag-mainnews","21":"tag-media","22":"tag-news","23":"tag-top-stories","24":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115733956324675449","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}