I was in a shop yesterday afternoon when I heard an RTÉ bulletin about the murder of Jady Cristine Pereira Rosa.
I gasped when I heard that her husband, the suspect, had taken his own life. I immediately thought of Masumeh Manojan, an Iranian woman murdered in Galway just a few short months earlier.
The reason my mind went straight to Masumeh was simple: the man accused of her brutal murder, her husband Ali Sorabi, also took his own life days after a Garda investigation into her death began.
The death by suicide of the lone suspect in cases like these robs the Gardaí, the State, and ultimately all of us of the chance to see justice done. But it does something else too — it seems to help the memory of those killed fade a little faster from public consciousness, since there are often few or no court appearances, no trials, and none of the detailed reporting a trial would otherwise generate.
Jady Cristine Pereira Rosa, a 33-year-old law graduate originally from Sorocaba, Brazil, had built a life in Limerick over several years, working for a cleaning company and becoming, by all accounts, a well-loved figure to those who knew her — described as “kind and bubbly.”
On the morning of Friday, 21 August, friends who were due to walk to work with her, as they did every day, grew worried when she didn’t appear. Her husband, Judismar Weslei Batista, told the group she would be down shortly. When she still didn’t materialise, they contacted Gardaí.
Roughly twelve hours after her body was discovered, Batista was found dead near Blackrock Castle in Cork.
Jady’s death is not an isolated horror. It sits within a grim and recurring pattern in Ireland — one that Women’s Aid and academic researchers have worked for years to document, because the State itself does not track it as a single category.
I don’t want to speculate about what happened in the lead-up to Jady’s death. But we do know what happened to Masumeh Manojan: she had sought help to escape her killer before he slit her throat and left her body near Waterloo Bridge in Clifton. After she made it known she feared for her safety, he was, it seems, simply moved to another IPAS centre.
The pattern goes back further still:
Eileen and Jamie O’Sullivan (2021). On the evening of the 7th of September 2021, neighbours found the bodies of Eileen O’Sullivan (56) and her 24-year-old son Jamie at their home in Ballyreahan, near the village of Lixnaw in north Kerry. Gardaí were called, and the body of Eileen’s partner, 63-year-old Mossie O’Sullivan, was found near the property a short time later. A shotgun was recovered close to his body.
An inquest later returned verdicts of unlawful killing for Eileen and Jamie, and suicide for Mossie. Eileen had been shot twice, including in the upper arm, and her injuries showed she had tried to defend herself before the fatal shot to her chest; Jamie had no defensive injuries. A neighbour, the last person to speak to Eileen, recalled her as her ordinary, happy self out walking the dog the evening before.
The coroner called it “an entire family wiped out” and praised the Garda investigation, noting officers had put themselves at risk on the night the bodies were found.
Seema Banu and her children (2020). Mother-of-two Seema Banu (37), from India, was killed alongside her 11-year-old daughter Asfira and 6-year-old son Faizan in their home in Ballinteer, Dublin, in October 2020. Her husband, Sameer Syed, who was on bail at the time for assaulting her and had a documented history of domestic violence, took his own life in prison before the case reached trial. Before her death, Seema had told others: “He is dangerous. He will kill me.”
The grim discovery was made on 28 October, after neighbours reported not seeing the woman and her children for several days. Syed had been barred from the family home, but he later admitted to visiting it on 29 occasions between 20 August and the date of the murders, in breach of his bail conditions. On the night of the killings, CCTV showed him boarding a Dublin Bus in Rathmines around 8:05pm on 22 October, disguised in women’s clothing, before travelling to Ballinteer.
Disturbingly, on that same day, Syed appeared to coerce his wife and children into recording a video in which they claimed he had never hit Banu and that the marks on her body were self-inflicted. After his arrest, he admitted to Gardaí that he had killed his wife after sneaking into the house, though he claimed someone else had killed the children — a claim disproven partly by his fingerprints being found on a plastic bag under Asfira’s head.
Banu had told an acquaintance, Kamran Khan, that she and her children were being beaten and tortured by Syed. It was reported that Gardaí and social workers first became aware of the abuse through staff at Dunnes Stores, where Khan worked.
Banu repeatedly told Gardaí and friends that she loved her husband and wanted her family to reunite, which is a common enough pattern in coercive control.
She had made plans to escape with her children, but repeatedly changed her mind, with the inquest into her death hearing Syed had threatened that the children would be taken away if she did this, or went to the Gardaí.
Claire and Joe Collins (2023). Claire Collins (50), manager of the Burren Visitor Centre in Kilfenora, lived in the townland of Crossard in Kilnaboy, Co Clare. On the 9th of November 2023, her husband Joe’s brother called to the house by prior arrangement and found the front door open with a note on the stairs telling him to check upstairs and outside.
He found Claire lying on a bed, and Joe’s body suspended from a basketball hoop at the back of the house.
A pathologist found Claire had died from asphyxia consistent with smothering by another person and had defensive wounds on her wrists, while Joe had also died from asphyxia. A jury returned an open verdict in Claire’s death — finding it was neither an accident nor self-inflicted, but stopping short of naming her killer, since there was to be no criminal trial — and a verdict of suicide for Joe.
The couple had two adult daughters and had recently become grandparents.
Clodagh Hawe and her sons (2016). Further back is the case that perhaps did the most to change public conversation in Ireland. On the 28th of August 2016, teacher Alan Hawe (40) killed his wife Clodagh (39), also a teacher, and their three sons — Liam (13), Niall (11), and Ryan (6) — at their home near Ballyjamesduff, Co Cavan, before taking his own life. Clodagh’s mother, who had seen the family the night before when Liam played a basketball match, grew suspicious after finding a note in Alan’s handwriting stuck to the back door warning people not to enter and to call Gardaí.
Clodagh was found downstairs with head and neck injuries; her sons were found upstairs in their beds. Alan was found dead in the hallway, having taken his own life. At the 2017 inquest, a jury returned verdicts of unlawful killing for Clodagh and the boys, and suicide for Alan.
A Garda review published in 2025 found the original investigation had mistreated CCTV evidence and missed a phone belonging to Alan Hawe that was later found to contain images of child sex abuse.
Some families live inside the danger before anyone outside it fully understands what’s happening. Seema Banu told an acquaintance she and her children were being beaten. Masumeh Manojan asked for help and was still failed: her children are now orphans.
By the time gardaí or neighbours come to realise what’s going on behind closed doors, the situation has often been building for months or years — normalised, minimised, or hidden by the person living through it, sometimes out of love, sometimes out of fear, or a tangled cocktail of both. Coercive control in particular is built to keep outsiders from seeing the full picture until it’s too late.
Even when someone does try to intervene, there’s no guarantee it helps. Leaving, reporting, or being reported on can be the most dangerous moment in an abusive relationship. This is a well-documented pattern you won’t have heard for the first time here.
Seema Banu was threatened with losing her children if she went to gardaí. Masumeh Manojan sought protection, and her abuser was simply relocated.
That doesn’t mean intervention shouldn’t happen — it means it has to be done with an understanding that the moment of escalation is often the moment help arrives, not the moment before it. Recognising that risk is not a reason for family, friends, or the State to look away. It’s the reason the response needs to be better than it currently is.