Mum of Dean Fitzpatrick says she could have prevented his death

• Published date: 25 May 2023
• Author: Paul Healy
• Publication title: DublinLive (Ireland)

Tragic Dean (23), who is the brother of missing teenager Amy Fitzpatrick, was stabbed to death on this day ten years ago - May 25, 2013. Today his mother Audrey marks the landmark 10th anniversary of his killing, which happened at a Dublin apartment - five years after his sister vanished from the Mijas Costa area of Spain in 2008

"It feels like it does every day every year. I know it is a landmark thing, ten years. But it doesn't make a difference.

"I miss him every day. I miss his phone calls. I miss talking to him," Audrey told the Irish Mirror.

The full details of what happened to Dean cannot be published at this time due to ongoing legal proceedings in a separate case - but Audrey says the events of that tragic day remain with her ten years on.

"What can I say, it's been ten years but it still feels like it was yesterday.

"It hasn't gotten easier. You learn to live with it I suppose more in the last ten years. But I don't think it will ever go away," she said.

And Audrey revealed that she believes had she been there in the Dublin apartment where Dean was stabbed that day, perhaps the killing wouldn't have occurred.

"It's still crystal clear in my head. That night I was staying with my Dad because he had Alzheimer's and we used to do shifts with him.

"I couldn't leave my Dad until I got someone else to mind him. Of course, it would just happen that one night that I wasn't in the apartment.

"Things could have been different. Things would have been different had I been there.

"But I wasn't. It's all ifs and buts and maybes and you can't change the past you know," she said.

Asked if she believed she would have been able to prevent the confrontation that led to Dean being knifed in a crime that was deemed to be manslaughter, Audrey said: "I'd like to think so. I'm nearly positive I would have yeah.

"It would have been worse if I was out on the town. I'd have felt more guilty. But I was with my father.

"I was doing something that I was needed to do. But that's life," she said.

Paying tribute to Dean, Audrey says she remembers him as a charmer who called her on the phone almost every day. "Like everybody said he was a charmer. He had the same cheeky smile as my Dad. He would ring most days. We would answer the phone to each other all the time.

"It was always 'Alright Ma what's the story, and I'd say alright chicken. We always ended the phone call by telling each other that we loved each other.

"He was very protective over me as well."

Audrey says Dean was...