A convicted killer and rapist has been jailed for nine years, with the last six months suspended, after he pleaded guilty to a hammer attack in Cork city, which left a 29-year-old man with serious head injuries.
Ian Horgan, 39, of no fixed abode, but formerly of the Hermitage, Macroom, in Co Cork, also admitted assaulting the man's 66-year-old mother during the attack at their home.
At Cork Circuit Criminal Court today, Detective Superintendent Michael Comyns described how Horgan put clothing, runners and a hammer into a plastic bag at his home in Macroom, before getting a bus to Cork city and walking to the victim's home at McCurtain Villas, off the Bandon Road.
Horgan had changed his shoes and clothing in a nearby derelict shed.
Wearing a hood and snood covering his face, he knocked on the family's front door, pushing past Mary O'Callaghan running at Hassan Baker, who tried to disarm him of the hammer.
Det Superintendent Comyns said he was shouting in a Dublin accent pretending it was a drug debt.
"He grabbed Mr Baker around the neck for 20 to 30 seconds causing him to collapse unconscious by the fireplace. He struck him on the left side of the head with the hammer, fracturing his skull and cheekbone," he said.
When Mrs O'Callaghan tried to intervene, he assaulted her with a hammer fracturing her right wrist.
Det Superintendent Comyns said Horgan recorded Mr Baker and Mrs O'Callaghan "in extreme distress and in a disorientated state".
He later shared videos of the crime scene with his then girlfriend, who had previously been in a relationship with Mr Baker.
Horgan left when Mrs O'Callaghan told him her son was dead, the court was told.
When arrested and questioned, he made no comment in the course of six interviews.
Before a trial could take place, Horgan pleaded guilty to the count of assault causing serious harm to the victim, and assault causing harm to Mr Baker's mother.
In his victim impact statement to the court, Mr Baker said: "Since I was assaulted, I have felt devastated, scared and I live in a paranoid state, looking out the window and over my shoulder, every single day."
"I am always on alert in case something sudden happens. I have constant nightmares and night terrors. I wake screaming in the night a lot."
Mrs O'Callaghan said it was like being part of a horror movie, there was so much blood but "unfortunately it was real".
She said: "He kept on pounding Hassan's head with the hammer. At this stage, Hassan was unconscious and I thought he was dead. I managed to get in between them and I shouted that he is dead."
Mrs O'Callaghan said when she looks at the marks on her son's head she "can see the imprint of the hammer on the side of his skull. I know I am lucky he is alive".
Horgan's defence counsel James O'Mahony said his client had spared the State a lengthy trial by pleading guilty, that he had written letters of apology to the two victims, and he was trying to put his time in prison to good use.
Sentencing him, Judge Helen Boyle said the accused man had also written to her expressing his remorse.
The judge said premeditation was an aggravating factor, as were the facts that he armed himself with a hammer and directed the blows at Mr Baker's head causing fractures to his skull, jaw and orbital bone around his eye socket.
The judge said the injured man was left with significant physical difficulties, a stammer, headaches, nightmares, seizures and extensive scarring.
Speaking afterwards, Mrs O'Callaghan said they are relieved the case was over.
She said: "I only hope he [Horgan] serves every day of the sentence he got for my son's sake. He is where he should be and he should never get out.
"I'm just so happy he got what he deserved and that he is locked up and I got some justice for my son.
"My son never deserved what he did to him. He is an animal and if I had my way, he wouldn't see the light of day until he was an old man."
