Cork kidnapping trial continues

Katie O’Donovan was knocked to the floor by two raiders as she opened the door of her home in Rochestown and she looked around to see one of them going up the stairs with a revolver to where her four children lay sleeping, a jury was told this afternoon.

Mrs O’Donovan gave evidence yesterday at the trial of Gerard Clarke, 35, of 2 St. John’s Terrace, Upper John Street, Cork, who faces two charges of possessing firearms, two of falsely imprisoning the couple and one of making a threat to kill or cause serious harm to Gary O’Donovan at 7 Dewberry, Mount Oval Village, Rochestown, Cork, on May 2 and 3.

Mrs O’Donovan was calm and composed as she described what happened on the night that she and her husband will not forget. She did not break down in the witness box and only once did her voice show signs of cracking.

That was when she said: “I saw the taller of the two men going upstairs with a gun in his hand to where my children were.”

An hour later her husband returned home.

When he saw the man wearing a balaclava and pointing a gun at him his first reaction was that it must have been a joke, albeit not a very funny one. Initially he was so convinced it had to be a joke that he joined his two index fingers and made the mock sign of aiming a gun back.

He reacted angrily when he realised the sinister reality of what was happening.

“I saw Katie’s face was distressed. I decided there was no way my home was going to be violated in that way. No way someone was going to be holding my wife who was heavily pregnant and my kids asleep upstairs and my unborn child.

“If I can repeat verbatim in front of your lordship (Judge Patrick J. Moran), I said: ‘No f**king way, not in my house.’ I attacked the gunman,” Mr O’Donovan testified.

He felt he was almost getting the gun out of the raider’s hand and was managing to cope with being zapped in the back from a stun gun but he was then zapped repeatedly around the neck followed by blows to the head with the handgun which felt like hammer blows, and he realised he was

overpowered.

He was bleeding heavily from the head.

He said the smaller of the two raiders said later: “You get the cash, you give it to us, you claim it off insurance, no problem.”

Mrs O’Donovan described going upstairs to her bedroom with the raider armed with the revolver.

She got into bed and prayed for the safety of her family. “He told me, when all this is over, if I identified him or his accomplice

they would come back and get us. It did not matter if we moved house, moved city or country, if either of them spent a day in jail because of anything we said or did they would come back and kill us,” Mrs O’Donovan testified.