Girl who 'preyed on elderly' remanded

A Romanian teenager, who was found guilty of trespassing at the home of a 78-year-old woman, has been remanded on continuing bail pending sentence at the Dublin Children’s Court.

Judge David McHugh adjourned sentencing until Thursday to allow the case go before Judge Clare Leonard who had heard the trial last month.

The defendant Dadina Gheorghe, with an address at Woodhaven Gardens, in Clondalkin, in Dublin was a juvenile at the time of her arrest but by her hearing at the Children’s Court on May 25 last she had turned 18 and had reached adulthood.

She had been found guilty of trespassing with intent to put fear in another, at the pensioner’s home, at Church Road, in Malahide, in north Co. Dublin, on March 18 last.

A probation report on the teenager is to be furnished to the court. The defendant had four prior convictions and last year had been given a 10-month suspended sentence for a theft offence.

In evidence, the complainant had said that the defendant had been repeatedly calling to her home which is connected to a house belonging to her sister, who is in her eighties and suffers from poor health.

She said that she heard her sister speaking to the accused and went around and told her to leave. The teenager remained in driveway despite being told repeatedly to get out. “She just shrugged her shoulders and said so what,” the victim alleged.

The victim said the teenager had called to her home numerous the times over the last four to five years and on each occasion had been told not to come back.

The victim told prosecuting Garda Suzanne Lavin that “I have seen her in the past looking in the windows if the door was not answered, she could be up to anything.”

The victim agreed with the defence that the defendant had often asked for food. On previous occasions when asked to leave the defendant would do so “but the thing is she kept coming back.”

Detective Garda Gerry McNally told Judge Leonard that the injured party was in a very “distressed state” when he arrived at her home. His colleague Garda Lavin arrested the accused whom he said had been previously warned that she was not welcome at the elderly lady’s home.

He said this was because the victim was in fear and added that on previous occasions the teenager had been calling to homes of the senior citizens in the area. When asked what the teen was known by the gardaí for, Det-Gda McNally said: “for getting into elderly people’s homes, preying on the elderly.”

Garda Lavin told the court that she had told the accused four weeks prior to the incident that she was not welcome at the victim’s address.

In evidence the defendant said she had been allowed into the victim’s sister’s home when she asked for a biscuit, a drink of water and to use the toilet. She agreed that she had been begging and claimed that she had been making her way out of the driveway when the gardaí arrived.