Man who killed and cooked dog was mental health nurse

Man who killed and cooked dog was mental health nurse

A MAN who strangled his dog before cooking it and feeding it to another dog is a qualified mental health nurse with a “complex and disturbing” history, a court has heard.

Details of Dominic O’Connor’s background emerged at Downpatrick Crown Court on Tuesday where he was due to be sentenced in a shocking case of animal cruelty.

Twenty-eight year-old O’Connor, of Roden Street, Kircubbin — previously known as William Mocsari — had denied the charge of causing unnecessary suffering to an animal but a jury took less than five minutes to find him guilty at his trial in October.

The jury heard harrowing details of O’Connor’s earlier confession to police, in which he told how he strangled his four year-old collie, Jess, skinned it, cooked part of it in a stew “with a few onions and an oxo cube”, and threw the rest of the carcass on his fire. He said he then fed the stew to his other dog, Shadow.

At Tuesday’s hearing Judge Piers Grant adjourned sentencing until later this month.

Defence lawyer Chris Holmes acknowledged O’Connor was convicted on “overwhelming evidence” but argued there were psychiatric issues to be taken into account.

“Clearly this is an unusual and very disturbing case to say the very least,” he said.

Mr Holmes said O’Connor had been adopted as a child, suffered a family breakdown and been a victim of abuse. Despite this difficult background, the barrister said O’Connor had gone on to third level education.

“He became employed as a mental health nurse,” said Mr Holmes. “Only in 2015 do you see a shift.

“In 2015 he went off the rails.”

Pointing to a report compiled by a consultant psychiatrist, Mr Holmes said O’Connor had a “disordered personality that was psychopathic and dissocial” and also demonstrated “empathic failure”. He said that this disorder was likely to be behind his offending.

“There is a complex and disturbing mental health background in this case,” he said.

Judge Grant said that as O’Connor was a father he intended to alert social services to the pre-sentence and psychiatric reports. He said he would also agree to a Prosecution application that would ensure O’Connor would never have the care of any other dogs.

Prosecution lawyer Laura Ievers said the maximum sentence in animal cruelty cases was five years in custody, and Judge Grant remarked that it seemed “pertinent in this case”.

He went on to adjourn sentencing until November 29.

Referring to O’Connor’s killing of the dog, the judge said: “Much of the evidence came from his own lips. For no good reason, he simply decided to murder it, kill it. He did that by strangling it by its lead and then stripping it of its skin and then butchering it and cooking it and feeding it to one of his dogs.”

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