“As soon as I put my key in and opened the front door I realised that something was wrong…”
A man who shot an intruder to his father’s home in north Dublin says that the intruder had threatened to kill him before the shooting took place.
Graham Lowndes shot and injured an intruder to his father’s house in North County Dublin in 2012; his father was 78 and living alone at the time.
Speaking on Today with Sean O’Rourke on RTÉ Radio 1 on Thursday, Graham said that he arrived at his father’s house to find the first room he entered “totally trashed”.
He then went outside carrying a loaded firearm that his father owned and had been keeping on his farm and after following tyre marks left by a car outside, he encountered the intruder, who was shot and injured by Graham after a struggle between the pair.
“As soon as I put my key in and opened the front door I realised that something was wrong… the first room was totally trashed,” Graham said.
“As I approached the car, I could see he was stuck and he was trying to drive the car. He screamed a few profanities at me, he said he was going to effing kill me,” he added.
The intruder subsequently got out of the car, Graham said, stood up to him shouting that it had nothing to do with him and decided to leave the scene.
Graham said that he tried to stop him, hit him a thump and a shot was fired. The intruder hadn’t tried to take the gun off him, Graham said, but he felt threatened by him and felt that he was concealing a weapon under his jacket that was over his arm.
Graham told Sean O’Rourke that he learned later that the intruder had called to his father’s door earlier in the day that the incident had taken place.
Mr. Lowndes was later charged with unlawful discharge of a firearm and possession of a firearm without a certificate – as it belonged to his father.
He told O’Rourke that his father had turned his house into a fortress after the incident and while he said that, in hindsight, he would have made a bigger effort to contain the intruder and that the use of the firearm was perhaps a mistake, he admitted that he thought it was right at the time.
You can listen back to the interview in full on RTÉ Radio 1 here.
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