Doctor tells court he thought Parnell Square victim was dead
By Bairbre Holmes, Press Association
A doctor who arrived at the scene of an alleged attempted murder on Parnell Square in Dublin has told a court he thought a young girl who had been injured was dead.
The Central Criminal Court in Dublin has heard that multiple children and an adult were injured in the incident, including a girl who is now in a wheelchair and non-verbal.
Riad Bouchaker, aged 52 and of no fixed address, is charged with the attempted murder of two girls and one boy, and assault causing serious harm to an adult, at Parnell Square East in Dublin City on November 23rd, 2023.
Bouchaker is also charged with assaulting three other people and with producing a 36cm kitchen knife.
He has pleaded not guilty to all eight charges.
On day eight of the trial, the jury of nine men and three women heard from Mike Boyle, a neonatal consultant in the Rotunda Hospital, which is located on Parnell Square.
Under questioning from Karl Finnegan SC for the prosecution, Mr Boyle described how he immediately ran to the scene upon hearing about the incident.
He said a neonatal transport team wearing distinctive bright red jackets was also there.
The team was made up of trainees and nurses, and he said he had a “responsibility to make sure they were ok”.
Mr Boyle said he came across a little girl lying on the ground who looked grey, with drains in her chest.
Chest compressions were ongoing, he said, as “they were trying to massage the heart”.
He said he was present for an unsuccessful attempt to insert a breathing tube into the girl’s airway and felt for a femoral pulse in her leg, which would have indicated if her heart was working, but could not find one.
Asked about the girl’s condition when he was treating her, Mr Boyle said: “I thought she was dead.”
Mr Boyle said his team “went against all protocols” and just “ran with it” and got a universal type of blood from the Rotunda to be given to the girl.
A pediatric consultant, Peter Harper, from the nearby Temple Street hospital, also arrived at the scene, and Mr Boyle said they believed the girl would need to go straight to surgery.
Mr Boyle said he ran to Temple Street hospital to tell the emergency department she would not be going there and ran to the operating room to make sure it could be available to treat her.
As that hospital does not have a heart surgeon, he said he asked a colleague to phone the Mater hospital to see if they could “send a heart surgeon down”.
The trial before Mr Justice Tony Hunt continues.
