Three traumatic years after being raped, Leonda Nolan (13) took her ownlife. Her mother tells Conor Lally how she believes the system failed her.
Bernie Nolan still expects her 13-year-old daughter Leonda to come bounding through the hall door. She still fixes her bedroom, folds her clothes and tidies her belongings. But Leonda is never coming home. Four weeks ago, Bernie found her eldest daughter dead. It was a tragic ending to a short life weighed down with pain.
When she was 10, Leonda was raped by a man known to her family. And within a year of the attack, she lost her father, Paul, to liver failure.
She kept the rape a secret for almost three years. But at a price. She changed from a happy-go-lucky, well-adjusted little girl, into a troubled child who pushed away all of those around her.
She became persistently involved in trouble at school and attacked her mother a number of times. On one occasion she ran at Bernie with a screwdriver, on another with a knife, before finally throwing a hammer at her.
When she eventually confided earlier this year that her problems were as a result of being raped, her mother desperately tried to rescue her child by securing professional help. Just as the family thought Leonda was emerging from her troubled period, she took her mother's medication and choked on her vomit while she slept.
Now her family is left only with bitterness towards a system which they believed failed Leonda. Their misery is compounded by the fact that the man who raped her will never face charges. She mentioned him three times by name in the note she left her mother on the night she died. His name also featured in statements given to gardaí. Detectives interviewed him twice.
But because gardaí now have no witness, they have told Bernie Nolan that it is likely the case will never reach court.
"I'm very bitter about it," says Bernie, recounting her daughter's story at the family home in Basin Lane flats, off James's Street in Dublin's south inner city. "Not only did he rape her, as far as I am concerned he murdered her as well. That's the bottom line. She wouldn't have taken an overdose, she wouldn't be dead today only for him."
Before she was raped, says Bernie, Leonda was like any other spirited child.
"She loved sport, she was really into it. And she loved drawing. She always had a pad in her hand, scribbling away. She was a little daredevil. She was brilliant in school, always straight out with the books to do the homework when she came home." Leonda was also an animal-lover and wanted to be a vet. When her pet bird died, she put him in a cigarette box and buried him near her home.
While her father's death was a major event in her life, it was not the source of the deep troubles that were to engulf her. "When her dad died, it knocked her for six. But having said that, she was the strong one in the house. She never cried here, she'd wait until she went to my sister's house and she would find her on the end of the bed crying. She was trying to hide it from me.
"When Paul died, the first year, it was a rough year for me. I was in and out of hospital, because I took a breakdown over him. When she went into secondary school I was pulling myself together and I said to myself, 'right, she'll change now'. But she didn't. She got more aggressive. She wasn't doing her homework. I was being constantly called up to the school. It was completely out of character for her. She was hitting people, being very violent, really, really aggressive.
"I used to hate going out of the house, hate coming in. There were people saying to me 'if that was my child I'd kill her, I'd do this or that'. But where was that going to get me, what was the point?" Leonda's family still knew nothing about the reasons for her behaviour.
Just before Christmas 2002 she took a cocktail of her mother's painkillers and tranquillisers, some 76 tablets in all, and overdosed. On that occasion Bernie found her in time because she checked on Leonda and her younger sister, Lindsey, in the middle of the night.
Leonda spent five days in Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children, Crumlin, where she saw a psychologist. But she refused to go back to see him again. Bernie admits her daughter was stubborn.
"When she came home she was still very into herself. Whenever I asked her why she did it, she'd say she couldn't tell me. I said to her that she could tell me anything. After the hospital stay she got worse." At this point two social workers had been assigned to the case.
"The social workers rang my brother and asked him would they (his family) take her for a while, to their house in Ballyfermot. She spent six weeks up there, she was fine, going to school, doing her work, but she was still very deep into herself. I was broken-hearted, ringing her every night, breaking down crying, asking her to come home. She came home, said she'd start behaving herself, this, that, and the other. She was fine for a week or two, but after that it was back to square one again."
Seven months ago Bernie requested another social worker be asked to engage with Leonda. The request was granted and within a short period Leonda confided in her aunt that she had been raped.
Leonda recounted how, when she was 11, she visited a house with her father, her brother James, now 15, and her sister Lindsey, now 12. Her father was unaware that a man in the house brought her into a room and raped her.
When the story emerged last April, Bernie said she was distraught at the thought that her child had been attacked, and that she had kept it to herself for so long. She immediately took Leonda to the Garda, and she made a statement.
"There were certain things, woman's things, that when I saw [her statement] I said to myself, 'yeah, this has happened'. Leonda's big fear was that he had never used condoms, because most of them in that house are on drugs." Less than a month later, Leonda was able to give gardaí a more detailed statement about how she was attacked.
"She said he was so big, she couldn't fight him off, that he was very heavy," says Bernie. Leonda's attacker was almost 10 years her senior.
"After [she gave a second statement] she started to relax a little bit more. She thought after the first statement that nobody cared, that nobody was going to do anything about this. But then when she gave a more detailed statement she felt something was going to be done."
Bernie says at this point the gardaí working on the case moved to allay Leonda's concerns regarding the investigation. They explained to her how the case would unfold, that they were required to take statements and prepare a file for the DPP. She was told it was the DPP who would decide if charges would be brought.
In the week before Leonda took the overdose which would lead to her death, the gardaí contacted Bernie with an update. They said the statements they needed were in place and all that remained was for a social worker's report to be completed, before the suspect would be arrested and a file sent to the DPP. Bernie waited for a couple of days before telling Leonda.
"She was chuffed", says Bernie, but "petrified" that she would be forced to go to court to give evidence, where she would have to face the accused.
"That was her biggest, biggest worry. But there was still no indication that Leonda was going to have to do anything. She was talking to me much more, I thought it was a new beginning, she had started to really pull herself together." On the night she died, September 25th last, Bernie says Leonda was uncharacteristically affectionate.
"I was lying on the bed looking at the television. She got in behind me, which was unusual, and she put her arm around me, snuggling into me. She said she was sorry for all the trouble she had caused. I told her to forget about it. She told me then she didn't feel well. I felt her head; she seemed to have a bit of a temperature. I said to go into her room to sleep. She asked me to bring her up a drink of water. So I did and we were talking inthe bedroom about the court case and other stuff, and listening to Westlife. We talked about a lot of things, how things were going to change. She said it was going to be different. I told her I believed if she got her head into the books she could be a vet, which is what she wanted because she had a real passion for animals.
"She was writing something on a pad and I asked her could I have a look at it. I told her to read me a bit. She said, 'don't worry ma, you will get to see this letter'. I hadn't got a clue what she was writing. We had no intentions of falling asleep; she was still in her jeans. She asked me if I was going to stay with her, if I was going to take her temperature later." They both fell asleep in the room.
"I woke up at 1.10 a.m. I went to check her temperature and she was slumped over her locker, she was freezing. I went over to her. Her arm was hanging over the bed. There was stuff coming out of her mouth, I wiped her mouth, I knew . . ."
The note Leonda had been writing was one she was leaving for her mother. The Garda is currently holding it as part of the evidence in the case. But Bernie remembers some of it: "Hiya mam. Sorry I have to do this. But he has my head fucked up because of the way I am, the way he left me." She added: "I'll tell my da and my granny you said hi".
Bernie has been told that because Leonda is dead, the alleged rapist will not go to court.
Looking back, Bernie sees her daughter's last months as a series of missed opportunities.
"If she had had one person stuck in there with her, one on one, not to take any bullshit off her, to get into her head whether she liked it or not . . . My heart was broken with her. She showed all the symptoms for a long time, but nobody noticed. The professionals should have known. How many kids out there have been through the same and have ended up on the streets or taking drugs because they got no help?"
The best chance was probably when Leonda returned to the family home after staying with relatives in Clondalkin in the weeks before she died. At that point she finally agreed to seek help, to go to St Louise's - a unit for the investigation of disturbed children at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children, Crumlin.
The morning after Leonda returned from Clondalkin, Bernie says she rang her daughter's social worker to inform her that the child was willing to attend at St Louise's. Bernie was told Leonda would have to be put on a waiting list.
The family wasn't told how long the waiting list at St Louise's was. They still don't know. It is of little consequence now. Another missed opportunity.
When contacted by The Irish Times, a spokeswoman for Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children said: "We are not in a position to comment on individual cases because of patient confidentiality."
Bernie recalls: "I said to the social worker, 'come on let's move on this, Leonda wants this'. I told her Leonda was going to do this, that she'd promise me. I told her she needed to get help. I said 'you can deal with this, Leonda, I know you can deal with it'. I told her I was right behind her. The child was looking for help."