sentenced to four years in prison<\/a>.<\/p>\nJackie first met Patrick \u2018Elvis\u2019 Murphy, the man who would become her husband, on a “blind date” when she was just 23.<\/p>\n
He died six weeks before their 18th wedding anniversary.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe worked in the local shop, so everyone knew him. People called him \u2018Elvis\u2019 because he loved Elvis Presley.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
He was hardworking and \u201ccouldn\u2019t sit still for five minutes\u201d, Jackie said.<\/p>\n
But one bright Sunday morning, everything changed.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019d always go out cycling on a Sunday if he wasn\u2019t doing the grass,\u201d Jackie said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a bright day. He was wearing a high-vis jacket, and he had lights on his bike.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut he was late back. I assumed he had met someone and stopped for a chat.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen the squad car stopped at our house.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey said \u2018it\u2019s your husband\u2019, and I just knew.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey asked me if I wanted to identify the body at the scene or if I wanted to identify it later in hospital.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jackie went to identify her husband at the scene, a white cloth draped over him.<\/p>\n
He had been propelled by the car into a neighbour\u2019s garden.<\/p>\n
Had he been knocked into a ditch or field instead, Jackie wonders when they would have found him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s frightening,\u201d she said. \u201cAt least, where it happened, he was found.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The woman who killed Patrick was a learner driver at the time, she said.<\/p>\n
\n The thing that got me most, and still gets to me, is the fact that she was allowed to drive afterwards and go into a driving test.\n <\/p>\n
\u201cIf you kill someone on the roads, you should automatically be banned from driving.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd blood samples [to test for intoxicants] should automatically be taken either at the scene or in hospital.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd the sentences should be longer. She got over four years, but she\u2019ll be out after three.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I\u2019ve been served a life sentence. My husband\u2019s not here anymore.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd if someone leaves the scene \u2014 like she did \u2014 it should be a minimum of 14 to 20 years in prison.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will always wonder if she had stopped at the scene and helped Patrick, would he be alive today? I will never know.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
An inquest has not yet been held into Patrick\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy husband hasn’t got an actual cause of death yet. We can’t get his full death certificate,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Jackie has been left with the emotional pain of her husband\u2019s sudden loss. And she has also suffered financially, losing an important wage in the home.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first Christmas going into the new year, I didn’t want to leave 2023. Because that meant going into the new year without him, leaving him behind.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I have to live for both of us now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jackie thanked the ambulance service, the garda\u00ed and the fire service.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome were strangers, some were people I knew. It’s hard for them too, especially when it’s someone they knew.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Driving conditions were good on the day Patrick was killed.<\/p>\n
But Moriarty and her boyfriend had been partying the night before. They had an argument and left a house party separately.<\/p>\n
She took his van on Sunday morning to look for him when he did not return home.<\/p>\n
At 8.25am, just 250m after leaving the house, she hit Patrick\u2019s bike, propelling him over a wall and into a house\u2019s front garden.<\/p>\n
A passerby noticed debris on the road 30 minutes after the crash. He looked over the wall and saw Patrick extremely injured on the ground.<\/p>\n
Moriarty was on a provisional licence and therefore should not have been driving unaccompanied.<\/p>\n
She was uninsured on her boyfriend\u2019s van.<\/p>\n
After hitting Patrick, she drove another 2.5km and then hit a ditch.<\/p>\n
She was arrested after this second crash and was found to have a blood alcohol reading of 197mg per 100ml, which was described in court as \u201chigh\u201d.<\/p>\n
Although a headline sentence of seven years was initially set by Judge Ronan Munro, this was reduced to four years and eight months due to mitigating factors, including her early guilty plea.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The final eight months of her sentence were suspended, and she was disqualified from driving for eight years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A woman whose \u201csoul mate\u201d was killed by a drunk driver in Kerry has called for legal changes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":534021,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[187201,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-534020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-kerry-news","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}