A Dublin man shouted racial epithets before he was struck, fell and died from a head injury on St Patrick’s Day, a US jury heard.
Sanusi Sadiq (30), of Quincy, Massachusetts, a bouncer in a nearby nightclub, is standing trial in Boston for the manslaughter of Barry Whelan (46) in March 2023.
Mr Whelan was found lying on his back in downtown Boston on March 17th, 2023. He was taken to hospital and died from his injuries, a skull fracture and brain haemorrhaging, three days later, according to prosecutors.
Opening the prosecution’s case in Boston’s Suffolk Superior Courthouse on Monday, Assistant District Attorney Jillian Bannister told jurors that it was “not okay to say the N-word; it is also not okay to take the law into your own hands.”
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Mr Whelan was originally from Dublin and emigrated to the US in 2002. He worked as a carpenter and lived in Woburn, north of Boston.
Mr Sadiq’s defence attorney Michael Chinman told jurors that Mr Whelan called the defendant “lazy” and a “f***ing N-word”.
He claimed the Dublin man was drunkenly accosting black men on the street and confronted the defendant twice before Mr Sadiq struck the Dublin man shortly before 9pm.
Mr Chinman insisted that his client “deliberately did not use enough force to hurt Barry Whelan”. He told jurors that Mr Sadiq used the side of his wrist and that the strike did not cause injury – “not even a bruise”.
Ms Bannister told the court that Mr Sadiq, who is 196cm tall (6′5″) struck Mr Whelan, sending his “body flying back” until his head hit “the hard surface below.”
Mr Whelan “died as a result of the defendant’s actions,” she said.
Mr Sadiq intended to strike Mr Whelan and “in doing so he endangered Mr Whelan’s life,” Ms Bannister told the court.
“These intentional actions of Mr Sadiq are what we are here for,” she said.
Ms Bannister conceded that “Mr Whelan may have said some disparaging remarks including the N-word to Mr Sadiq.”
She said the N-word is “truly one of if not the worst word in the English language,” but that that’s “not the end of the story of what happened”.
The prosecutor also stressed to jurors that there is no audio in the CCTV video of the assault and that jurors “will have to decide if these horrific things were even said”.
The case continues in Boston.
