Gardaí have arrested a man for questioning in connection with the death of a 22-year-old woman in Cork city centre earlier this year.
Detectives investigating the death of Amy McCarthy, a mother of one whose body was found in a derelict building in April, detained the man at a location in the Midlands at around 9am on Tuesday.
Ms McCarthy was found on the second floor of a vacant office block on Sheares Street at the back of the Mercy University Hospital in Cork by paramedics on the morning of April 30th last.
The paramedics had been called after the emergency services were alerted by a man who had tried to wake Ms McCarthy but failed to rouse her.
Ms McCarthy, a native of Greenmount on Cork’s southside, was attended to by paramedics but they could not resuscitate her and she was pronounced dead at the scene.
A postmortem was carried out by Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margaret Bolster at Cork University Hospital but the results were not released. It later emerged that gardaí were awaiting the results of certain toxicology tests on blood samples taken from Ms McCarthy before they decided what course their investigation would take.
It is understood that gardaí received the results of these tests in recent weeks and moved to arrest the man, who is from east Cork and was known to Ms McCarthy.
A senior garda source said investigators were satisfied that “violence was a contributory factor in Ms McCarthy’s death”.
The man is being held at Cork’s Bridewell Garda station under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act.
Tributes were paid to the late Ms McCarthy at her funeral mass on May 8th when hundreds packed St Finbarr’s South Parish Church in Cork.
Ms McCarthy’s sister, Hayley, told mourners that “if love could have saved Amy, she would have lived forever” as so many were so fond of her.
