‘I’m dying’ - stabbing victim told girlfriend

A Co. Armagh man stabbed in the neck and chest and left to bleed to death called his girlfriend for help as he lay stricken, a jury heard today.
By The Newsroom
Published 1st Sep 2021, 12:12 BST
Father-of-two Brian Phelan, 33, was stabbed to death on the Carrivekeeney Road, a few miles outside Newry.Father-of-two Brian Phelan, 33, was stabbed to death on the Carrivekeeney Road, a few miles outside Newry.
Father-of-two Brian Phelan, 33, was stabbed to death on the Carrivekeeney Road, a few miles outside Newry.

The Newry Crown Court jury of seven men and five women heard that when Brian Phelan first called his girlfriend just before 2pm on 26 July 2018, he seemed to be in good form” but an hour later the 33-year-old called her again and kept saying “I’m dying” and asked her to come to him.

“He sounded as if he was choking,” prosecuting QC Neil Connor told the jury, adding that CCTV footage taken from a nearby house showed an “interaction” between Mr Phelan and his alleged killer Daniel Carroll who he had gone to meet.

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That footage, Mr Connor told the jury, showed the victim holding his neck as he sat down in the garden of a property on the Carrivekeeney Road and then lying down.

It was there that a passerby found him and alerted the emergency services including the air ambulance.

“Despite the best efforts of the civilians and emergency services life was pronounced extinct at 3.56,” said Mr Connor who showed the jury a photograph of the tragic Mr Phelan as he lay dead in the garden of the property.

A pathologist found that Mr Phelan had sustained five stab wounds, three to his neck and two to his chest.

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It was two of the wounds to his neck that lacerated the carotid and thyroid arteries which were “the most serious and significant injuries.”

Carroll (30), with an address at Edward Street in Portadown, is on trial facing a single charge of murder.

He was arrested within two hours of the killing but refused to answer police questions or offer any explanation until 15 months later when his legal team lodged a defence statement claiming that three unidentified men had “suddenly appeared” and launched a murderous attack on Mr Phelan, warning Carroll to “stay out of it” before they fled the scene.

“It’s the prosecution case, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the existence and presence of these three men are an invention by the defendant,” declared Mr Connor, “dreamt up by him over a period of 15 months since his arrest to try and explain away the incontrovertible evidence that points fairly and squarely at him as the person who stabbed Mr Phelan.

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“We say that once you have heard all of the evidence in the case, you will have no hesitation in finding the accused guilty on the sole count on the bill of indictment, the murder of Mr Phelan,” the lawyer told the jury as he concluded his opening.

The trial, which is set to last up to three weeks, continues.