The low-level criminal who grew to wear the murder of brave garda like a badge of honour
LIFE was good for Aaron Brady in early 2013. The young man from Crossmaglen was in a steady relationship with Jessica King, an attractive girl from Cullaville, and renting his own property in Armagh. Every weekend after partying with his friends in Ridleys nightclub in Dundalk they would return to the prefab to continue their drinking sessions into the early hours of the morning.
His father also had the prestigious role as chairman of Crossmaglen Rangers, one of the country’s most successful GAA clubs, where Brady played at under-age level. But despite all this, there were financial burdens hanging over him from a court case and he needed to make quick, easy cash. This greed would have fatal consequences.
Born to Tony and Caroline on February 16, 1991, in Dundalk, Brady and his family lived in the Monaghan village of Inniskeen before relocating to Nottingham in England. His parents would later have two daughters, Sonya and Laurene.
They returned in the early 2000s and at 16 Brady finished school having completed his ordinary level GCSEs. He worked locally before emigrating to Australia in his late teens and later to the US.
When Brady returned home, he built up minor criminal convictions for public order, driving a stolen car and other motoring offences on both sides of the Border.
His behaviour was becoming more erratic and he would come to further Garda attention.
He was later charged with a dangerous driving incident which caused thousands in damages in October 2011.
The bail conditions and curfew imposed did little to stop him, and he was also left with a compensation bill to pay for the damage caused.
By January 2013, Brady – along with his group of fellow bandits – made a decision to rob the credit union at Lordship, the last stop for the cash collection on the Cooley peninsula every Friday night.
The robbery, on the last
Friday of the month, netted the gang just €7,000 while a further €27,000 was left behind in a separate bag.
The raid had also cost Detective Garda Adrian Donohoe his life.
By the following day, during a chance encounter with gardaí, suspicions were growing around Brady and his friends of their involvement in the Lordship robbery.
The mounting Garda pressure and reports in the media grew too much for Brady and he fled on April 8, 2013, to the US.
First, he settled in Boston before relocating to the Woodlawn area of the Bronx, where he became accustomed to life within the Irish community.
He got a job in construction, played for a local GAA team, and would frequent the various pubs along Katonah Avenue every weekend.
Brady would tell the trial it was a “home away from home” and many people he knew from Armagh had relocated to Woodlawn.
As time passed, he grew more confident. Brady was living openly in the community, using his given name and regularly updating his social media accounts on his new life in New York.
He would regularly boast about not just his involvement in the Donohoe murder, but also claimed he worked for ‘Border Fox’ Dessie O’Hare in Ireland.
By that time, it was common knowledge among the Irish community in Woodlawn that the Crossmaglen man was being blamed for the murder of a garda back in Ireland.
Key prosecution witnesses would tell the murder trial how Brady seemed to feed off this. Molly Staunton revealed how Brady and his friends said they were “the most feared men in Ireland”.
Daniel Cahill, a barman who worked in one of the pubs Brady drank in, witnessed first-hand the murder suspect’s erratic behaviour. He told the trial of one fight in which Brady was punched in the face before threatening to kill the man who had assaulted him, saying he had killed before.
Despite the numerous admissions during his time in the Bronx, Brady was confident they wouldn’t come back to haunt him.
In late 2015 he had met Danielle Healy, a barmaid who worked in the Heritage Bar in nearby Yonkers where he regularly drank. By the following October, the Kerry woman gave birth to the couple’s baby boy. In April 2017, they married and Brady applied for an American green card as Ms Healy was a US citizen. All seemed to be going well for Brady.
The fugitive believed his reputation in the Bronx was enough for people to maintain their silence, and that he was out of the reach of gardaí in his new safe haven. He was wrong. Shortly after 5am on May 18, 2017, as he drove to work, his world came crashing in when Homeland Security agents detained him for being in the country illegally.
Brady was deported the following week and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment over the Dundalk offence he was on bail for when he fled the country, before being charged and finally convicted of capital murder.
He had built a new life in New York where he believed he was untouchable. But, for the next 30 years at least, Brady will simply be known as prisoner 74326.