A chronic drug addict has been jailed for 9\u00bd years for two violent car hijackings during which he threatened to kill a woman and a married couple.<\/p>\n
Anthony Cooney (38) held a knife to the neck of a 70-year-old woman at about 5pm on January 8th after getting into her car, Garda Shane McConkey told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.<\/p>\n
Cooney told her to drive to Clondalkin. She was terrified and began driving. The woman later asked Cooney what he would do once they got to Clondalkin, and he told her: \u201cI\u2019m going to kill you.\u201d<\/p>\n
The woman believed she would be killed and began to slow the car down. He began shouting at her to keep driving but the woman managed to stop the car, get out, and Cooney drove off.<\/p>\n
The victim left her mobile phone in the car. When her daughter called it, Cooney answered and demanded \u20ac1,000 be paid for the return of the car. The car was tracked to Emmet Road, Dublin 8, using an app and a knife was found in the back.<\/p>\n
Four hours later, a 45-year-old teacher was picking his wife up from South Great Georges Street in Dublin city centre when Cooney opened the back door of their car and got in.<\/p>\n
He began shouting at them both and, when the woman tried to leave, he told her he would kill her husband if she did. She got back in and Cooney pulled out a weapon, which the victims thought was a knife but which was later identified as a fork.<\/p>\n
He told the man he would kill the woman, and, as the man drove off, he held the fork to the necks of each of them in turn. At one stage, they were stopped in traffic and the man tried to get the attention of other drivers.<\/p>\n
Cooney noticed this and began stabbing the man in the arm with the fork and punched him in the head. He told the man he would kill his wife if he tried this again.<\/p>\n
He directed the man to drive through red lights at pedestrian crossings and continued to threaten the couple and stab at them with the fork. He demanded the driver hand over the keys and cash. The man told him the key fob was in the boot.<\/p>\n
Cooney told him to stop the car and get the fob while he held his wife in the car with the fork to her neck. After the man gave Cooney the fob, the couple managed to escape and get on to a passing bus.<\/p>\n
Their ordeal lasted 15 minutes and the couple believed they would be killed throughout, said Garda Shane McConkey.<\/p>\n
The woman told the court in a victim-impact statement 15 minutes \u201cis a very long time when you don\u2019t know if the person you love will be alive at the end of it\u201d.<\/p>\n
Cooney drove the car off across the city and crashed into a crossing commercial van. The stolen car was written off and Cooney was arrested at the scene. He was found to be too intoxicated to be interviewed.<\/p>\n
Cooney was on bail at the time of these offences for a public order offence committed in Tullamore.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe caused havoc and has left at least three people with huge trauma and a severely affected peace of mind,\u201d said Judge Martin Nolan. \u201cAll of these people cannot go out in Dublin city without thinking of the incident.\u201d<\/p>\n
He imposed a sentence of 9\u00bd years for the unlawful seizure involving the couple. The maximum penalty available to the court is 15 years. He imposed a number of other sentences on the other offences, with all sentences to run concurrently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A chronic drug addict has been jailed for 9\u00bd years for two violent car hijackings during which he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8219,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1346,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-562347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-garda-siochana","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562347","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=562347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}