Mary Cassidy recalls how her presence at the scene of the murder of 14-year-old schoolgirl Ana Kriegel prompted her to resign from her job as a state pathologist, reports The Mirror.
Dr Cassidy said the sight of the tragic teenager’s naked and bruised body in a derelict farmhouse in Lucan, Dublin, proved to be “the straw that broke my back”.
Gardai found Anna on May 17, 2018 – three days after she left her home in Leixlip with a boy from her class.
She was naked except for a pair of socks and had suffered sexual assault.
Erie Cassidy performed an autopsy and determined the young woman’s cause of death to be blunt force trauma to the head and neck.
She revealed: “We talk about the straw that breaks the camel’s back. That was the straw that broke my back. That was when I decided to leave. Because normally I would go into a scene and I would think right, what do I need to do… and I’m focused. But that was the first time in a long, long time that I just stood there and went ‘Who would do that, and why would they do that?’ As soon as those words came out of my mouth I knew, that’s time to go. I’d been thinking about it, thinking ‘well I’ve got a few years left what’ll I do?’ but that day made up my mind for me,” reports The Mirror.
Two 13-year-old boys, identified in court as Boy A and Boy B, were found guilty of Anna’s murder. Boy A was also convicted of aggravated sexual assault.
The court heard the boy was wearing a zombie mask during the attack. His phone contained thousands of pornographic images, including investigations into child molestation and sexual violence.
Dr. Cassidy spoke about the case in the latest episode of her RTE series Dr. Cassidy’s Casebook, which aired on Monday evening.
Blinking back tears she revealed: “Dealing with children is always difficult. Very early on somebody mentioned that they thought it might be somebody that she knew and that they might be young, and that is when I thought ‘Good Lord’. You know I’ve seen a lot of things and, you know, I’ve seen some horrendous things. I can honestly say that this was not the most horrendous murder I’ve ever seen,” reports The Mirror.
Dr Cassidy continued: “I just had to pull myself together and just say ‘right’ as I’ve always said – from the very first time I cried at a post mortem when I had two babies to deal with. And I thought ‘for goodness sakes just pull yourself together, this does not help anybody. This is what you’re here to do, get on with it and make sure that you do a damn good job’,” reports The Mirror.
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