‘This is after totally devastating me. I am shocked’

“THERE was a little fellow of five, a smaller fellow. They have been here about two months. We’d say hello passing. They seemed to be a quiet family. He was from around Milford and she was from Tournafulla.

“I don’t think she was working and you’d see her down in the shops. He’d be around later in the day. We heard about it in school at about half two. It’s a very quiet, safe town.”

That was how schoolgirl Leslie Quilligan, who lives nearby in Assumpta Park, remembered Sarah Hines, her children, Amy (4 months) and Reece (3) as with her partner they walked their dog in Hazel Grove Estate in the quiet little village of Newcastle West.

Now, Leslie and the other estate residents are wondering what happened in the rented house that left Sarah, Amy, Reece and Sarah’s friend, 20-year-old Alicia Brock, dead.

Latvian Agris Svares initial reaction was confusion as he walked into the estate at about 3pm after his day’s work at a factory in Newcastle West.

His rented semi-detached house was next to the house where four people died hours earlier in a frenzied attack.

“I live in the yellow house. I don’t know,” he said.

As he made his way towards his rented home he was then told he could go no further as it was a major crime scene.

Leaving Cert student Mary Long, who lives at nearby Castleview Estate, said: “We knew them just to see them out walking their dog. They were a boy friend and girl friend living there and two kids. They were here just about two months.”

James O’Connor, a 50-year-old local man, said: “This is after totally devastating me. If I was told the women were stabbed and that was it and they were okay, you’d be shocked, but to be brutally murdered. And the little kids, little angels. I only heard about it a while ago. Somebody said to me two people and two children had been murdered. I thought he was confusing it with the deaths in Ballycotton earlier in the day. I thought they were mixing it up. But God help us to be murdered like this. My mind can’t think now. I am shocked, totally shocked.”

Retired public health nurse Ena Flaherty, who has been living near Hazel Grove Estate as her house is being refurbished, said: “I got a phone call from a friend and said was it true four people were dead in Newcastle West. That was the first I heard of it. It is hard to take it this in as this is a small, quiet town. We are after another terrible tragedy a few weeks ago when three local men were killed on their way home in a taxi from the Listowel races.”

Roy McMahon, who runs a butcher’s shop across the road from the entrance to Hazel Grove, said: “I heard about it at around 2pm and then all of a sudden gardaí started pulling in cars and swarming all over the place.”

All three priests in the parish were attending a local funeral when the gardaí went to the scene.

Curate, Fr Richard Keane, said: “This is a terrible tragedy. I and the two other priests were at a funeral mass. We just heard about it when leaving the cemetery. We are totally shocked, stunned and sickened. Two young children and two young women brutally murdered. We did not go to the scene as it is a crime scene, but we have made ourselves available to the gardaí to go to the scene. It is a shocking thing. The community here have had enough tragedy with car accidents, this year.”

Niall Collins TD said: “The community is absolutely numbed by news of this multiple tragedy and the scale of it. It is hard to comprehend, people are finding it hard to comprehend, the brutality and the scale of it, two young women and defenceless infants.”