A 29-year-old man has walked free from court after a jury took less than an hour to acquit of threatening to kill a woman, falsely imprisoning her and aggravated burglary at her home in Co Cork last year.
Jamie McKenzie broke down in tears when the jury of nine men and three women returned “not guilty” verdicts on all three charges on the third day of his trial at Cork Circuit Criminal Court.
McKenzie from Dun Eoin, Carrigaline, Co Cork had earlier pleaded guilty to a fourth charge of obstructing Garda Tony Devane at Kingswood, Carrigaline on March 28th, 2020 and was given a three month suspended sentence.
During the trial, the complainant had told how she was awoken in her bed around 6am on March 28th, 2020 by McKenzie who was tapping a ceramic knife against her leg and demanding to know where someone was in the house.
The woman explained to McKenzie that there was no one in the house other than herself and her three children, then age two, five and nine, who were sleeping in another upstairs bedroom where her cat had given birth to kittens.
“I woke to Jamie McKenzie tapping my leg with the end of a knife, saying ‘I am here now, I am in your room, what are you going to do?’ He was tapping my leg with it, poking my leg with it. It was a ceramic knife with a grey handle.
“He was shouting he was going to stab him, ‘Where is he?’ I said there is no one else here (except her children). I was confused as to why he was there in the house. The last thing I wanted was some stranger standing in my house.
“He said I did not think he could get in. He said he could get in anywhere, he could always get into my house. He said he would have no problem to kill me or my family – I took that to mean the three kids.
“He put the knife up to me – up by my cheek, by my face… He said he had killed before and he would do it to me,” said the woman who told defence counsel, Shay Roche SC ,that it was 8am before McKenzie left the house.
She said she rang a friend first to tell her what happened and waited until she had sent her children to school before she rang the gardaí some two hours later as she didn’t want to upset them by telling them a man had been in the house.
McKenzie totally rejected the complainant’s version of events that he had come into her house uninvited, tapped her leg with a knife and later threatened to kill her. “None of them things are true,” he told the court.
He agreed with his counsel, Mr Roche, that he had gone to the house to tell the woman that she should not be seeing a particular named man when she was also going out with a friend of his.
However, he denied that he had chased one of the woman’s dogs around the house or that he had smashed pictures and candles on a hall table with the tubular part of a vacuum cleaner. “Absolutely not true,” he told the jury.
After the jury acquitted McKenzie, Det Garda Margaret Ryan gave evidence of how he had obstructed Garda Devane in the course of his duty when gardaí went to arrest him at a different house at Kingswood in Carrigaline.
She said that McKenzie was on the landing at the top of the stairs when gardaí entered the house and identified themselves as members of An Garda Síochána. They had said they were armed but McKenzie had lashed out at them.
“Gardaí identified themselves and shouted ‘Armed gardaí’ but he was quite aggressive and continued to lash out at them on the landing,” said Det Garda Ryan, adding McKenzie had 16 previous convictions including eight for public order offences.
Defence counsel, Mr Roche said that his client overreacted on the morning gardaí called to arrest him. He said McKenzie wished to apologise to Garda Devane and his colleagues and that he apologised in the court.
Judge Helen Boyle was told that McKenzie had spent four months on remand for the four charges and she imposed a three month term on the obstruction charge but suspended all of it in the light of his guilty plea to the charge.
