‘A scream I will never forget, and still haunts me to this day’ Court told of 6-yr-old’s reaction to dad’s death as New IRA chief jailed
THE wife of a man brutally murdered in a pub car park said she will never forget her six-year-old son’s scream when she told him his dad was dead.
New IRA Dublin chief Kevin Braney was found guilty at the Special Criminal Court on Monday of the killing.
The 44-year-old was the fourth person jailed for life for the murder of dissident Peter Butterly outside The Huntsman Inn in Gormanston, Co Meath, on March 6, 2013.
The victim’s wife Eithne revealed her little boy’s horror at learning of his father’s death.
She said: “His scream is a scream that I will never forget and still haunts me to this day. He was only a baby.”
The 35-year-old victim was chased and shot dead in view of students waiting for their school bus in what the three-judge court said was not “a spontaneous act”.
The father of three died from gunshot wounds to his neck and upper back.
In a powerful victim impact statement, Mrs Butterly told Braney: “You have no concept, nor do you really care how we feel but I am going to tell you regardless.
“Peter was an excellent, loving and proud father to Kevin Braney was found guilty of murder our three children and their lives without him to protect and nurture them have been horrific to say the least. Our two daughters were his princesses and he absolutely adored the two of them.
“He participated in so many ways in their childhood and their love of sports was an enormous bond between them.
“Peter attended and supported the girls in so many of their activities and was always the proudest daddy of their many achievements.” Mrs Butterly said her son has “very few memories of his daddy, thanks to you, but a few are still vivid and poignant to him. He remembers Peter giving him ‘the forklift’ to bed every night and the two of them going through the Find Stig book”.
Braney, from Glenshane Crescent in Tallaght, Dublin, had pleaded not guilty to murder.
Delivering judgment following an 11-week trial which ended in December, Mr Justice Coffey said the court was driven “irresistibly” to the conclusion Braney was involved in the organisation and the planning of Butterly’s murder beyond a reasonable doubt.