Husband’s ‘bad feeling’ on day wife and son died

A FATHER sobbed uncontrollably throughout a two-hour inquest yesterday, which heard how his 33-year-old wife and their eight-month-old son drowned in a stream.

Gareth Owen described how “he had a bad feeling” on the morning of July 14, 2007, after his wife Nollaig took their infant son Tadhg for a walk in woods near her family’s home in Kilworth, Co Cork.

Mr Owen, who is South African-born, was visiting from England at the time, where he had a job.

He was preparing to move to a new job in Ireland and his wife had gone ahead of him and was staying with her family.

Her husband told the inquest that she had been diagnosed with postnatal depression and that he had been told she had attempted suicide a few days before the drownings.

However, members of her family disputed that she tried to harm herself, although they admitted that she had been “very low and very tired”.

A local GP had written a letter of referral for her to attend a psychiatrist at Cork University Hospital. However, for some reason she did not go.

She was, however, attending a counsellor in the nearby town of Fermoy.

Mr Owen said he went to the woods to search for his wife and child about an hour and a half after they had left for the walk. He said his father-in-law, who has since died, then arrived at the scene and said there had been an accident. Ms Owen’s body and that of her child had been found in the stream a few minutes earlier by walkers.

The baby boy was still strapped into his buggy, which was submerged in the water.

“I was shouting, ‘No, no, no’. I was screaming, ‘Where’s Nollaig?’ I then broke down and started screaming, ‘Where’s my baby?’” said Mr Owen.

Locals took the two bodies from the stream and gardaí wrapped the infant in a blanket and let Mr Owen sit with him in a patrol car until assistant state pathologist Dr Margaret Bolster arrived.

“She took Tadhg from me and said she’d be gentle with him and put him into the coffin and the hearse,” he said.

Ms Owen’s sisters, Aisling and Geraldine Kenneally, said she was a really good mother who had a “fantastic relationship” with her son. She has a degree in early childhood studies from UCC.

On the morning of their deaths Ms Owen was overheard singing “you are my sunshine, my only sunshine” to Tadhg.

Dr Bolster, who carried out postmortems on the bodies, said that both mother and son died from acute cardio-respiratory failure, due to drowning.

She said there were no signs of trauma, or other injures on either of the bodies and that Tadhg was “a very well-cared-for and perfectly well-nourished child”.

She added that Ms Owen had small traces of sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety tablets in her blood.

Coroner Dr Michael Kennedy said it was difficult to know what happened that morning.

He said it was possible that mother and son had slipped off the embankment into the stream.

Dr Kennedy added that it could not be proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Ms Owen unlawfully killed her son and then took her own life.

“The only verdict I can advise you to choose is an open one, as we simply don’t know what happened,” the coroner told the jury.

The jury deliberated for a short time before returning an open verdict.

Inspector Senan Ryan, who read a number of testimonies at the inquest, offered his sympathy to Mr Owen and Ms Owen’s relatives. “I’ve done an awful lot of inquests, but this is as sad and as tragic as it gets,” said the inspector.