Mother dismayed as son’s killer sent to UK
THE mother of murdered boxer Kevin Sheehy has said she feels ‘very let down’ by the decision to transfer his killer to a UK prison.
Mr Sheehy, a five-time Irish boxing champion, was murdered after a house party at Hyde Road, Limerick on July 1, 2019.
His killer Logan Jackson, originally from Coventry, ran him over repeatedly with a Mitsubishi Shogun jeep. Jackson, 31, had pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty of manslaughter. The ten jurors rejected his defence of provocation and he was sentenced to life in prison for the crime.
However, the young boxer’s mother, Tracey Tully, has been left reeling after being told that Jackson will be transferred to a prison in the UK next month – something she believed wouldn’t happen for at least a decade. ‘On Saturday evening, I was told by gardaí that Logan Jackson will be sent back to his own country to finish his time and that was the first I’d heard of it,’ she said on RTE’s Liveline.
‘The trial had just been finished five months, so you could understand we’re traumatised... We were told it was out of the gardaí’s hands, and that the decision was made.’
Ms Tully was previously told that Jackson would be serving at least ten years in Ireland.
The grief-stricken mother remembered her son, who was due to become a father just weeks before he was murdered, as a ‘hero’.
‘He was robbed of so much,’ she said. ‘We were all robbed of so much, because I knew what Kevin wanted to do with his life, but we’ll never know what he could’ve done. [Kevin] was very respected, and loved in the community. If you met Kevin, you knew he was special.’
The Department of Justice issued a statement saying ‘the minister would like to extend her deepest sympathy to the family of Mr Sheehy for their loss’.
‘The department is precluded from commenting on the management of sentences of individual persons,’ the statement added, attaching an appendix on how foreign nationals convicted of crimes can be transferred to prisons in their home countries.
Ms Tully said that being transferred back to the UK would be ‘like a luxury’ to her son’s killer.
She added: ‘We’re still dealing with [Kevin’s death]. Justice for me would’ve been me walking out of that courtroom with my son. I feel very let down.’