Witness says she recognised accused

A WOMAN working behind the counter of a filling station described how she got a fright when she encountered a man carrying what appeared to be a knife shouting: “Give it to me, give it to me.”

At Cork Circuit Criminal Court, Patrick Constant, aged 28, of Riverview Estate, Tower, Blarney, Co Cork, denied a charge of carrying out a robbery of €500 at the Daybreak/Texaco filling station at Tower on May 12 last year.

Judy Mitchell was working in the shop on May 12.

“I saw someone passing the window… He came in the door and came up to the counter. He started shouting, ‘Give it to me, give it to me’. The hoodie was closed up and the string tied across his mouth, I could just see the eye area.”

She told the jury the man was carrying something in his left hand: “It was something like a knife, it could have been a knife or a screwdriver. I got a fright…

“He took a step as if he was going to come around the counter. I opened the till, I gave him 50s and 20s and I told him, ‘That is it, there is no more’.”

She said she recognised him as Constant, who had been in the shop several times before. “I recognised the ‘gatch’ of him, the way he carried himself.”

Donal O’Sullivan, defending, put it to the witness that she did not say she had recognised him in her first of two statements to gardaí. Ms Mitchell said she wanted to be sure. She said she was pretty sure at first and was certain when she thought about it and by the time she made her second statement.

The trial continues today.