Man, 28, ‘hit 90-year-old in self-defence’
Elderly farmer was found dead in his home
A MAN accused of murdering an elderly farmer claimed he repeatedly struck the alleged victim, who only had the use of one arm, in ‘self-defence’, a court has heard.
Ross Outram, 28, said 90year-old Paddy Lyons had attacked him with a stick, the trial also heard.
Mr Outram denies murdering Mr Lyons at Loughleagh, Ballysaggart, Lismore, Co. Waterford, in February 2017.
Opening the prosecution case as the trial opened yesterday, John O’Kelly SC told the jury a couple selling second-hand clothes – of whom Mr Lyons was a customer – went to his home at around 4pm on February 25, 2017. The front door was not locked and they found his body inside.
Counsel said: ‘It was immediately obvious that this man was either dead or in a bad way. He had injuries that were described by the pathologist as blunt force to the body with a traumatic brain injury, haemorrhage and shock.’ Mr O’Kelly said one of Mr Lyons’s hip joints and ribs were fractured and that these injuries were the result of blunt force.
He said there would be evidence that a blood-stained hoodie was later found in Mr Outram’s bedroom and that analysis of this showed the item contained DNA of Mr Lyons.
Mr O’Kelly said Mr Outram initially told investigating gardaí that he knew nothing about Mr Lyons, but ‘subsequently admitted that in fact he had been in Mr Lyons’s house’ on either February 24 or 25. Counsel told the jury that Mr Outram claimed he had asked Mr Lyons for money but that the elderly man had refused and then started attacking the accused with a stick.
Mr O’Kelly said Mr Outram said he struck Mr Lyons repeatedly in self-defence. Counsel also told the court that the accused said that when he left Mr Lyons’s home, the pensioner was still alive, and that Mr Lyons locked him out of the house.
Mr O’Kelly said that, at the time of his death, Mr Lyons had retired from farming but still lived alone on his farm while his land had been let out ‘for some years’. ‘He was a healthy and fairly active for a man of his age,’ Mr O’Kelly said.
However, he noted Mr Lyons had a ‘frozen right arm’ which he ‘couldn’t really use any more’.
The jury heard the deceased had been receiving home help and that his meals would be cooked for him, but that he also ‘got out from time to time and he met people’.
Mr O’Kelly said that when Mr Lyons’s body was found, he had been dead ‘for some time’.
He said Mr Lyons was alive the day before his body was discovered – as his home help had visited – and therefore ‘the death had to have taken place somewhere between 4pm on February 24 and 4pm on February 25, when his body was found’.
The trial of Mr Outram, of Ferryland, Waterford Road, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, is expected to last two weeks, the Central Criminal Court heard.
The case continues, before Judge Paul Coffey and a jury of eight men and four women.
‘Had a frozen right arm’