THE WIFE of a man who was fatally stabbed in front of her has told the Central Criminal Court that she pleaded with the two men on trial for murder to stop attacking him but they kept going.
Janette Cawley said she saw Warren and Jeffrey Dumbrell pursuing her husband, Christy, into the flat complex where they lived at Tyrone Place in Inchicore, Dublin, on the evening of October 29th, 2006.
Mrs Cawley said she saw a knife in Warren’s hand and a long object in Jeffrey’s hand and she screamed at her husband to keep running but he fell just before he reached the stairwell of the flat tower. “Then the two of them were on top of him . . . they were just hitting him all over,” she said.
Her husband twisted on to his back and dragged himself further up the stairs, she said, and she grabbed a large plastic child’s car and threw it down at the men hitting Jeffrey Dumbrell on the back.
“He looked up at me, I kept pleading with him to stop . . . he just put his head back down and continued what he was doing,” she said. One of her daughters and her five-year-old son were also on the stairs and she screamed at them to get inside. “The men didn’t stop,” she said.
When asked by Paul Burns SC for the prosecution how long the attack had lasted, Mrs Cawley replied: “To me it was ages but I don’t think it was.” The men ran out of the tower block and her husband was not moving. She went down to him and, she said, he “was just lying there, his face was very white . . . there was a lot of blood coming from him, flowing out from the back of him.”
Warren (36) and Jeffrey Dumbrell (33), both of Emmet Place in Inchicore, have pleaded not guilty to murdering Mr Cawley.
The 33-year-old father died after being stabbed in the back, hip and thighs six times.
Mrs Cawley’s daughter, who cannot be named for legal reasons, also gave evidence, telling the court she had been standing with her father on waste ground near the flat complex when she saw two men approaching. She said under cross-examination by Warren Dumbrell’s defence barrister, Michael O’Higgins SC, that she had heard her father talking to her mother about a fight with the Dumbrells earlier in the day.
Her father had met a member of the Dumbrell family on the bus, who had said to meet him in the field at eight o’clock. The girl said her mother wanted to ring the Garda but that was as much as she remembered.
The case continues today before the jury of 10 men and two women.