Doctor found tender neck after alleged garda assault

A DOCTOR who examined John Carthy after an alleged assault at his local garda station found tenderness around his upper neck.

Dr Patrick Cullen, of Coole, Co. Westmeath, told the Abbeylara Tribunal he saw no bruising in the sore area, but said Mr Carthy was very distressed. Dr Cullen said Mr Carthy visited him on September 25, 1998, and told him he had been arrested and questioned the night before over the burning of a model goat used as a mascot by the local football team.

Mr Carthy claimed to have been assaulted in the station and was very upset. Although he had not been charged with any offence, Dr Cullen said he did not get the impression Mr Carthy felt he had been exonerated.

Dr Cullen subsequently warned gardaí how Mr Carthy felt about them when he went to Mr Carthy’s home on April 19, 2000, after getting a call from his aunt who told him her nephew had put his mother out of the house and was inside alone firing off rounds of his shotgun.

Dr Cullen’s immediate concern was that Mr Carthy would harm himself but when gardaí arrived, as he was talking to relatives of Mr Carthy, he felt it important to point out to them that Mr Carthy “would not be happy to see them“. His fears were confirmed when a second pair of gardaí arrived and drove into the driveway of Mr Carthy’s house and Mr Carthy shot at their car after they had climbed out in an attempt to talk to him.

Dr Cullen, who was in the first garda car outside the front wall of the house, said he could not clearly hear what the gardaí said but had heard his name mentioned and believed Mr Carthy had fired a shot immediately afterwards. He said he had hoped he would be able to talk to Mr Carthy once he was disarmed, but was unwilling to approach him while he still had the gun. He later provided gardaí with some of Mr Carthy’s medical records and at one stage was asked to contact him by phone but there was no reply.

Dr Cullen said Mr Carthy had never shown signs of being aggressive and there was nothing to indicate any difference in reports by psychiatrist Dr David Shanley to whom Dr Cullen referred Mr Carthy in 1995 after Mr Carthy expressed frustration with his lack of progress.

Another psychiatrist Dr John McGeown, of St Loman’s Psychiatric Hospital in Mullingar to which Mr Carthy voluntarily admitted himself four times in three years, also found no signs of aggression.

He wrote that he found Mr Carthy “a sensitive, insecure, diffident young man” who had feelings of guilt about his lack of success in life and a fear that he had let his late father down.

Dr McGeown felt Mr Carthy had not fully recovered from his father’s death in 1990 and felt it was significant that a minor workplace accident in 1993 which set off a series of “hypochondriacal” symptoms, had occurred on his father’s anniversary.

The siege at Mr Carthy’s home began on Holy Thursday 2000, the same day his father died ten years earlier.