A tale of two lives cut short

Warren O'Connor and Noel Deans lived very different lives and their deaths were not connected. Yet they died a mile apart, inside a 24-hour period, both victims of a violent, chaotic north Dublin neighbourhood, writes KATE HOLMQUIST

THE CEMETERY AT Balgriffin, north Dublin, has too many young people. Murderers and murder victims are buried almost side by side, along with many who have died from drug abuse and suicide.

“That’s the sad part – they all end up in the same spot and all the families that are grieving end up grieving in the same place,” says Angela McLoughlin, a community worker and grandmother who has lived in the area since 1981. With every murder, “there are two mammies grieving,” she says.

Two young men, Warren O’Connor (24) and Noel Deans (27) – the first a former soldier who had never been involved in crime, and the second a man who had spent most of the past 12 years in prison – were killed in Coolock within 24 hours last month. They are buried near each other in Balgriffin. Fr Terry Murray, who buried them both, used the same quote from Luke 23.44 at both funerals: “a darkness came over the whole land”.

Warren O’Connor, “Warro” to his family and friends, enlisted in the Army at 17 and was so disciplined that he ran miles every day in all weathers and trained at the gym almost daily. He taught himself to box for a charity tournament and was so dedicated to his appearance that he spent hours every day in the shower and even took photographs of the back of his head to make sure his hair was right before he went out, his mother Tina says.

He had a loyal group of friends and was, Tina says, “the rock of the family”. The new carpet in the hall, stairs and landing and the refurbished bathroom were paid for by Warren, who had been working on building sites since leaving the Army and was in the process of applying to the Dublin Fire Brigade.

On the evening of January 15th, Warren kissed his mother goodbye. Neither of them knew it was the last time. A few hours later, he was stabbed through the lung and heart. His killers left him to die in his friend’s arms on the side of the road. He died just after 1am on January 16th.

Less than 24 hours later, on the evening of January 16th, Noel, or “Noelie”, Deans was shot in the chest and head as he walked from the Priorswood Inn to see his partner, Tanya, and six-year-old son, also called Noelie.

Noel Deans first entered Mountjoy at the age of 14 – one of the youngest ever to be held there. Except for a total of 12 months of freedom, says his mother, Liz, he was in custody almost continuously for 12 years until a year ago.

At that stage, he had tried to make a fresh start as a father, brother and son and joined a Christian drug-rehab group. He had begun reading the Bible. His mother believes that he died at the foot of the statue of Our Lady on Ferrycarrig Road because he deliberately headed there after being shot.

THE QUESTION OF how Warren O’Connor, who had everything to live for and was a model citizen, could have been formed by the same community that created a minor criminal such as Noel Deans is difficult to answer. But that they should both die brutal deaths is less surprising, in a neighbourhood where violence is an everyday occurrence.

The two deaths occurred within a mile of each other, a week after the torture and killing of John Paul Joyce, whose body was found on the airport road nearby. Last year, his brother Tommy Joyce (20) was shot and killed at the Darndale halting site where the family lived.

People in parts of Coolock live in fear. Those who speak to me are so afraid of reprisal, that few – even those in authority – agree to be quoted by name.

As I stand by the memorial to Warren O’Connor on Hole in the Wall Road, where dozens of bouquets commemorate “Warro”, a couple pass by walking their dog. They tell me that within 24 hours of Warren’s death, their own son, who is 6’3” tall, has never been in trouble, and is now doing his mocks for the Leaving Cert, was mugged for his mobile phone, beaten with a hurley, and had his arm broken in three places. The 18-year-old, who was never afraid before, will now not leave the house without being escorted in the family car by one of his parents.

“We’re just glad that he protected his head, so he’s not sucking his dinner through a straw,” the parents say. They will not allow their son to identify his assailant to the Garda or to be a witness because to do so would mean that something even worse would happen to their son and their family.

One of Warren’s acquaintances, a university graduate who grew up in Coolock and is afraid to use his name “because everyone knows everyone and you don’t know who knows who”, says that 99 per cent of the people in Coolock are “good, honest working people” and that the people who killed Warren are the minority of “scum”: “These people have nothing to lose – stabbing you makes no difference.”

WARREN’S MOTHER Tina has hardly stopped crying since her son’s death. His father, Fran, stays in an upstairs bedroom looking at pictures of his son on his computer and listening to ballads Warren loved, such as Spancil Hill, sung by Warren’s friends at his burial.

Tina says she feels an “unreal anger” towards her son’s killer as she watches the sittingroom window, which looks out on to the green. She expects to see her son walking towards the house at any moment. She shows me many photographs of Warren, all featuring a young man surrounded by good friends, some of them on holiday, in a charity boxing tournament and at parties enjoying life. Among these is a framed photograph of Warren taken on the night he died.

On that night, Warren got a call from a friend living in the Grattan apartments with his girlfriend, who had a young baby and was pregnant. Grattan is a high-quality, Celtic Tiger-style gated apartment complex where residents say they pay up to €1,100 per month in rent. Brian McFadden used to live there in a double-sized penthouse with Kerry Katona.

That night, there was a loud party going on in the complex. Warren’s friend had knocked on the party host’s door and complained. The response he had got scared him enough that he felt he needed to get his girlfriend and her baby to safety, so he rang Warren – his tough-guy friend – to help.

Warren arrived and got the woman and her baby into his car. But as he drove them out of the apartment complex, some of the party-goers, in another car, rammed his car three times, wrecking their own vehicle. Warren got out of his car and, according to a witness who has written to Tina, said, “Why are you doing this? There’s a baby in the car.”

A scuffle broke out, and Warren ran back to his car. One of the party-goers went after him and the witness heard Warren say, “I’ve been stabbed”, then saw him fall. Another friend, Ritchie, held Warren in his arms, telling him to hang on and keep breathing. Ritchie has told Tina O’Connor that Warren was staring into his eyes the entire time, clinging to life, but then heaved one deep breath and died at 1.05am.

Tina went to Beaumont Hospital – she is too shocked to remember who called and who brought her there – but she does recall identifying her son’s body. She was not allowed to touch him because forensic investigations were under way.

Three arrests were made after the murder, but no charges were brought.

Noel Deans’s mother, Liz, describes the three weeks since Noel’s murder as “a nightmare, a surreal bad dream” and looks out the window expecting her son to “arrive for a bit of dinner” at any moment. “We are still asking why, why – if only we know why,” she says. “I always expected that if he ever died it would be from drugs or self-harm, not the way he died.”

FOR THE DEANS FAMILY, in which there are six surviving siblings aged 15 months to 29 years, there is the added stress that the entire family has been stigmatised, they say, because of Noel. Noel’s father, also called Noelie, has a pub-style bar with beer taps in the family kitchen because, he says, he has been barred from every pub and club in the area, not because he did anything wrong – he says he has never set foot inside some of the places he was barred from – but because he is Noel’s father.

“People stigmatise the family and the brothers and sisters who have done nothing,” says community worker Angela McLoughlin. She is among the many people I speak to who know the Deans family and say that that they are good people, and that none of the other Deans children have been in trouble.

Noel’s parents have never denied that their son was difficult. “He was his own worst enemy because all he ever did was self-harm. The system failed him. He was never given the help he needed,” says his mother. She believes that he was not a drug dealer because he never had any money for clothes and food, never said he owed money, never stole from the family and gave no indication at home that he was high on drugs. “He was not a junkie and a crackhead,” says his older sister, Emma (29).

“Noelie Deans’s death was tragic because the system failed him and never gave him the help he needed,” says John Curry, a community worker who knew Noel from childhood. Curry says everyone knows who “the players” are and that Noel was not “a player”.

There are two or three beatings of people who owe drug money every week in Coolock and being shot is the “final solution”, which is why, Curry says, some youths take their own lives to escape punishment. Entire families have been threatened by drug gangs, so that it’s not unusual for parents to take out second mortgages and credit union loans of anything from €8,000 to €50,000 to pay off their children’s drug debts, several sources say.

But Noel’s parents believe that he didn’t owe money and they have no idea why he was shot. Most of their son’s friends are dead – one choked on his own vomit, another died in a car crash and a third was killed in Mountjoy. They are all buried in Balgriffin.

Up to the age of 10, Noel, the eldest son, was “a great kid and never any bother”, says his mother, then he started disappearing for long periods, when the family assumed he was in the fields with his horses, which he cared for until the day he died. Between the ages of 10 and 13, Noel’s behaviour became a problem and the family was threatened with eviction from their council house; they have since bought their own home.

When he was 13, Noel’s parents became aware that he was sniffing glue and “joyriding” with a gang of older youths, says Liz. She and Noelie Snr would try to “keep him in”, then they would hear a car screeching and suspect it was Noel because “he loved adrenalin”. Noelie Snr says he “kicked in doors” trying to get his son out of certain houses and blames this peer group for turning Noel from an affectionate, trouble-free child into a teenager who was in constant difficulties with the Garda because “he was easily led”.

“I got angry with him many times trying to straighten him out,” Noelie Snr says.

When he was 14, Noel was the driver of a car that broke a garda’s leg. Noel always insisted to his parents that “he did not run him down”, but “once he got in trouble with the Garda he was always in trouble,” says his father.

After a spell in Trinity House School, the juvenile crime facility at Oberstown near Lusk, Noel was incarcerated in Mountjoy Prison at 14, where he was in a padded cell and separated from other prisoners. “He was only a child. We were told he needed psychiatric help when he was 13 and he never got it.”

In Mountjoy, Noel became a serious drug abuser. His arm swelled up with septicaemia from a dirty needle, so that he partially lost the use of a hand. On the short spells when he was out of prison, his parents never knew when he would be home and he would climb in a window using a ladder.

Last year was Noel’s “longest spell out since he was a kid.” He joined a Christian drug rehab group in 2009 and was clean for part of last year, but had started “dabbling back” shortly before he died. Fr Murray, who goes to Mountjoy every Saturday to visit youths and young men from his parish, says that Noel was very depressed in prison and “cried a lot”. Noel told his partner Tanya that he had been sexually abused by people outside the family and believed this to be part of his difficulties.

While in Mountjoy, Noel recorded a CD of himself singing and playing guitar. On the day I met his parents in their home, a man arrived with a CD Noel had made and a letter from the prison's music teacher, which Noelie Snr asked me to read aloud because he couldn't. Noel was "never any trouble", the teacher wrote. Noelie Snr put the CD on and we heard Noel sing Knockin' on Heaven's Door.

IRENE O’REILLY, THE Belfast-born director of services for the Dales centre, a drug awareness programme in Darndale, believes the community’s problems are the fault of the Government. It has failed to provide services to rehabilitate and educate drug abusers, sending them instead to Mountjoy where their addictions only get worse.

“This is the most wonderful community that is rich in the tapestry of services it has – it’s a disgrace the way the Government cutbacks are coming to affect areas that are already vulnerable, yet despite it all the spirit of the people here makes you very humble.”

Nevertheless, millions of euro in State funds have been poured into the hotspot of Darndale/Belcamp, providing excellent schools with dedicated teachers and projects providing drug rehab, job training, creative activities and homework support for teenagers, film-making, social workers, help for the elderly, parenting supports, psychiatrists, doctors, dentists – you name it.

A senior administrator, afraid to be named, says the answer is to take the anti-social culprits into the small village square and beat them with cat’o’nine tails. A community worker, also afraid to be named, says the “do-gooders” have the place in the state it’s in.

A resident of 21 years, who works in the village centre, says that gardaí on bicycles cannot possibly control drug-dealers on motorbikes who tear up the soccer pitches and that what is needed is the Army with machine guns. However, the Garda Emergency Response Unit has patrolled the area at times. The Garda was unable to comment on the Coolock crisis, for operational reasons.

“It’s the drink and drugs culture. There are kids who don’t care and know that because they are being dealt with by J-Los [juvenile liaison officers], nothing bad is going to happen to them,” another resident says.

“If this was Malahide or Castleknock, things would not have been allowed to get to this stage,” says Angela McLoughlin, who participated in the marches against drugs in the 1990s. “We were always a community that addressed the problem. Now it’s hard to do anything about it because it’s dangerous to speak out – you might get a slice.”

Liz Deans looks at her 15-month-old son, Noel’s youngest brother, and says: “If it’s like this now, what’s it going to be like when he’s a teenager?”

NOEL DEANS

1993

10-year-old “Noelie” is looking after his horses in a field near his parents’ home in Coolock

1996-7

Noel’s parents become aware that Noel is sniffing glue, and Noel has his first arrest for stealing a car. He will spend the next 12 years in prison for various offences

2003

Noel’s son, Noelie, is born

2009

Noel tries to come off drugs with the help of a Christian organisation

2010

Noel is shot dead near his home

WARREN O'CONNOR

1991

Five-year-old Warren is in love with Manchester United and his father, Fran, takes him to his first football practice

2003

Aged 17, Warren joins the Army before finishing his Leaving Cert

2008

Warren leaves the Army and works as a builder

2009

Warren is named Coolock Town’s Player of the Year and applies to the Dublin Fire Brigade

2010

Warren is stabbed to death while trying to rescue friends in trouble; Wayne Rooney sends his condolences