Murder stuns estate where ‘people don’t know their neighbours’
But this weekend, lurking behind the twitching curtains of semi-detacheds, was the nasty realisation that crime had propelled the blossoming Cork city suburb into unfamiliar and unwanted territory.
Neighbours of Eric Cummins, 29, gunned down in his driveway after returning from a night out with his partner and 18-month-old son on Saturday, were aghast to wake up to find their homes in the spotlight.
“You can live in the best place in the world and never know what’s on your own doorstep,” said one.
She was appalled the shooting had been witnessed by a couple of children who regularly play soccer on the green near where Eric Cummins lived.
“Thank heavens my 15-year-old son was with me, normally he’d have been on the green,” she said. Close by, another mother had little reason to be grateful. Her traumatised 13-year-old son was making a statement to gardaí after witnessing the horror.
Yesterday, police cordons kept curious onlookers from the scene of the crime.
Black plastic covered the front of the rented house where the dead man had lived for less than two months, concealing the gunman’s handiwork; a Nissan Micra in the driveway was similarly preserved, as well as a second car on the roadway outside the house.
A slim row of trees and bushes, separating Oldcourt from the more salubrious Fernvale, is believed to have offered the gunman a neat spot to conceal his weapon before making his deadly approach. He then made a quick exit out of Fernvale by way of a waiting car.
Yesterday, children gathered close to the cordon, some saying they had heard three gunshots at 10pm the night before, others saying they had seen a man with a baseball cap running off.
Three men arrived before lunchtime and laid a Liverpool hooded sweatshirt and a bunch of flowers as near as they could get to the crime scene. A man and a woman arrived later on to add to the pile, a neighbour said she had seen a wreath being delivered to the murdered man’s house. No one seemed to know him.
“People don’t know their neighbours around here, it’s a young estate and couples are working,” one woman said.
One couple living in the cul de sac said it was normally like a ghost town at the weekends, that many of the houses were rented and most people cleared off home. Another woman said there were “lots of comings and goings” to and from the dead man’s house in recent times.
“There are a lot of private houses, it’s a good area, this sort of crime in Cork is not prevalent,” said investigating officer, Superintendent Tom Hayes of Gurranabraher Garda Station.
If he appeared at a loss, it was nothing compared to the general sense of disbelief shared by residents of an estate unused to such lawlessness.
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