Paramedic details shocking crime scene to court

A paramedic has today told a Dublin murder trial that there was so much blood at the scene when he arrived that he could not kneel down beside the victim.

Paul Cahill was giving evidence to the Central Criminal Court in the trial of a 51-year-old Slovakian landscape gardener charged with murdering his Polish flatmate in 2007.

Josef Szabo of Rathlin House, Waterville, Blanchardstown has pleaded not guilty to murdering Robert Kwiatkowski on April 20, 2007 at their home in Rathlin House. The 33-year-old died from a stab wound to the chest.

Mr Cahill told the court that he was the first emergency worker to arrive at the scene at 9.07pm that Saturday.

“Three feet inside the door there was a man lying in an obvious pool of blood, face up with his head toward the door,” he said. “It was definitely life threatening bleeding.”

He said there was an obvious lack of consciousness, a large amount of vomit at his head and he could also see airway problems.

“What hit me straight away from a safety point of view was the large amount of blood,” he said. “I couldn’t kneel down. I went down on my honkers.”

He said there were two other men there and one of them was attempting chest compressions. Mr Cahill got him to assist in removing the victim’s t-shirt to find the wound and asked the other man to move out of the way.

“I was firing questions at the men. They weren’t answering me. They appeared to have poor English,” he recalled.

Mr Cahill said there was so much blood that he expected to find active bleeding, blood squirting out. However the only wound he found, which was on the chest, was just oozing millimetres of blood.

He used hand suction to unblock the airway and got the first man to continue the chest compressions. When his partner arrived at the door, he told him to go back for the defibrillator.

“It was obvious he wasn’t breathing and I guessed he was in cardiac arrest,” he explained.

Another crew arrived as his partner returned with the defibrillator.

“At some point a man came up to me and presented me with a carving knife across both hands,” he said. “I heard someone from the crew say ‘Put that back’.”

He was shown the knife found in the hallway and confirmed that this was the style of knife he saw.

He said that a woman put her head in the door at one stage, but he told her to go away as he did not know who she was.

After the defibrillator got three negative readings, he said he and his colleagues transferred him to the ambulance and rushed him to the nearby James Connolly hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Deputy State Pathologist Dr Michael Curtis told the court that Mr Kwiatkowski died of a single stab wound to the chest, which punctured the heart, a lung and an artery.

He said the knife found in the hall could have caused the wound. However he examined a number of other knives found in the apartment and said that two of these could also be responsible for the fatal injury.

Dr Curtis said the victim had no typical defensive injuries but had a bruise to the nose and a hand injury consistent with it having been trapped in a door, a scenario that was given to him. He said both the nose and hand injuries were fresh.

He said Mr Kwiatkowski’s blood alcohol level showed he was "grossly intoxicated", explaining that he would have been staggering and would have had slurred speech.

The trial continues on Monday before Mr Justice Barry White and a jury of three women and nine men.