A teenager who hit and killed a
cycling courier in Dublin last year and then fled the scene and dumped the car
has been given two years detention for the killing.
The boy is now aged 17 years but was 16 years when the he killed Thiago Cortes in Dublin’s north inner city last August just after buying the car in an unregistered sale.
The teenager’s sentencing
hearing at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court was told the estimated speed the boy
was driving at was 79km per hour, on a road with a 50km speed limit.
Witnesses said they heard music
blaring from the boy’s car, adding he had overtaken a lorry at speed, just
before he hit Mr Cortes and fatally injured him.
The boy was charged with
dangerous driving causing death at North Wall Quay, on August 31st,
2020, and failing to report the incident. He pleaded guilty to both charges and
has no previous convictions.
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Judge Martin Nolan sentenced the
boy to two years in a youth detention facility and gave him credit for the time
he had already spent in custody. That means his sentence is backdated to last
December.
Thiago Cortes (28) was from Rio
in Brazil and was working as a Deliveroo cyclist delivering food to people in
Dublin when he was killed. He had come to Ireland to study English and to work
as he and his fiancée, Teresa Dantas Oliveira (29), planned their future
together.
In her victim impact statement to the court she said she could “never fully explain” how she felt and how the killing of her partner had impacted her life so much. When he was in hospital before he sadly died, she said she “prayed for a miracle, but a miracle never came”.
Mr Cortes was injured in the hit
and run at 10.30pm on the night in question and was taken to the Mater Hospital
but died two days later. The boy drove the car from the scene and dumped it at Castleforbes
Square before he and the other teenagers in the car all fled.
However, the boy was tracked down and arrested after his mother’s house was searched and glass fibres found in clothes seized from him linked him to the crime scene. His fingerprints were also found on bottles in the abandoned car.
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