Baby killer is further sentenced
A 27-year-old man serving life imprisonment for the murder of his baby daughter was today sentenced to four years for stabbing the child’s mother.
The couple had a row in July last year and the woman threatened to leave when Derek Hickey produced a kitchen knife and stabbed her twice.
She then fled their flat in Newbridge, Co Kildare, and he turned the knife on their three-and-half-month old daughter Leliah as she lay in her crib killing her, Dublin’s Central Criminal Court heard today.
Hickey, who had attended a special school for slow learners, admitted murdering the child and assaulting Sinead Smullen, now aged 19, causing her harm.
Senior counsel George Birmingham, prosecuting, told the court the couple had left Leliah with Ms Smullen’s parents while they went shopping in Dublin but after the family returned home a row had developed.
In a statement to police Hickey admitted his crimes and said: "We were arguing and arguing and arguing. The two of us were getting thicker and thicker.
"I said, 'If you take the child home I won’t be able to see it'.
"I grabbed the knife and stabbed Sinead in the back. She started screaming and she ran out the door.
"The child got it as well. I am not sure where I stabbed the child but it was near the heart anyway.
"I walked out the door and remembered what I had done. I went out in the road and I was shouting for Sinead. Sinead was shouting, 'Help, help, help'."
Sgt Kevin Lavelle said Ms Smullen had been stabbed twice, in the neck and back, and required hospital treatment, while the baby died instantly of six stab wounds.
Ms Smullen told the court: "I’m not really recovered at all. I talk to my mammy about her, get out the house and meet people."
Through his legal team, Hickey, who has a six-year-old daughter from another relationship, expressed his "sincere sorrow and regret" for his actions.
Sentencing Hickey for the assault, the judge Mr Justice Paul Carney said: "The accused is a person who has convictions for violence.
"The assault by stabbing was a serious one and has continued to cause injury to Sinead.
"I would have thought that in all the circumstances an appropriate penalty would have been one of ten years."
But he said the maximum term he could impose was one of five years and, having to take into account the guilty plea, he sentenced Hickey to four years in prison, to run concurrently with the life sentence imposed last month.
Speaking outside the court, Ms Smullen said: "It is not long enough. It has been very hard for me."
She said she was coping "as well as could be expected, taking a day as it comes".
Her father, John, who has three other children, said: "He perpetrated two terrible, serious crimes and life should mean life. It was a frenzied attack.
"He was a rough-and-tumble character. He threatened her before. We knew something serious was going to happen. We tried to get her away from Hickey - he was a loose cannon."
He added his daughter now had a job in a supermarket and a new boyfriend and that he hoped she would have another child but that "it will never replace Leliah" who would now be 18-months-old.
