A doctor who was cycling in Dublin city centre moments after a number of children suffered knife injuries has described treating one girl who had a stab wound over her heart and appeared to have no pulse.
On Wednesday, the trial of Riad Bouchaker (52) heard from Peter Harper, a consultant anaesthetist at Temple Street Children’s Hospital. He said he was cycling to a meeting when he noticed ambulances, fire engines and gardaí at Parnell Square, near the top of O’Connell Street.
A member of the Dublin Fire Brigade directed him to the five-year-old girl, saying she had been stabbed in the chest.
He said paramedics were already doing chest compressions and he inserted a breathing tube into her neck.
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Harper said it was clear the child needed to be brought to an operating theatre immediately. He said the child had no pulse, looked pale and due to the position of the stab wound, it was likely her heart had been perforated, causing cardiac arrest.
He phoned his colleagues at Temple Street and told them to get the theatre ready and to find a cardiothoracic surgeon as soon as possible. Dr Lisa Corley, a paediatric registrar at the Rotunda Hospital, had already ordered blood which Harper used to perform a transfusion in the ambulance on the way.
When they arrived at Temple Street, he said the largest theatre was “luckily” available and he continued to work on the child until she went into intensive care.
Bouchaker (52), of no fixed address, is on trial at the Central Criminal Court charged with the attempted murder of two girls and one boy, and assault causing serious harm to creche worker Leanne Flynn at Parnell Square East in Dublin city on November 23rd, 2023.
He is further charged with assaulting two other children and an adult male and with producing a knife in a manner likely to intimidate. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and his trial is expected to last up to five weeks.
Conor Garvey told prosecuting barrister Karl Finnegan he was driving an ambulance to the Rotunda Hospital when someone on the road began “frantically” waving his arms at him.
The child had a laceration on her chest with blood oozing out rather than spurting, indicating there was very little pressure in the heart or that an artery had been nicked. She had no pulse and did not appear to be breathing, he said. The defibrillator indicated that there was no electrical activity from her heart and advised against carrying out a shock.
The court also heard from a man who recalled walking along Parnell Square East when he heard a woman scream from across the street. She appeared to be trying to fight off a man who was assaulting her, he said.
He saw a knife in the man’s hand and crossed the road because he wanted to disarm him. He “grabbed the knife from his hand” and once he had control of it he threw it away. When he was grabbing the knife, he said another man struck Bouchaker on the head with a motorcycle helmet.
Catherine Carbery, giving evidence via video link from Australia, told Finnegan she was walking near Parnell Square when she saw a man who “appeared to be attacking” a child with a knife.
Under cross-examination, it was suggested to Carbery that from what she saw she could not exclude the possibility that the defendant’s intention was, in fact, to “terrify and intimidate”, but not to stab.
Carbery replied: “I can only state what I believe was happening, and I believe he was injuring the child.”
