19 years ago, Terence Wheelock went into Store Street Garda Station alive

It’s almost 19 years since Sammy Wheelock last saw his little brother Terence alive.

Sammy was in East Wall that afternoon, on 2 June 2005, when he got word that Terence was in critical condition in the Mater Hospital.

Just a few hours earlier, 20-year-old Terence Wheelock had been arrested and brought to Store Street, known then as Ireland’s busiest police station, in Dublin’s C district in the north inner-city.

“How can someone walk into a Garda station in handcuffs for a crime they’d no involvement in, and come out on a stretcher two hours later?” said Sammy, on 5 April over coffee, a short walk from where the Wheelock family once lived in Summerhill.

Out of the corner of his eye, Sammy spots two of his sisters having tea before work.

He picks up a stack of paper petitions and gestures towards them. “Sorry, can you pass those over?” he says to Conor Reddy, a family friend and People Before Profit representative.

They’re for his sister’s neighbour, he says. She’s going to put the petition in the local gym.

The Wheelock family has never accepted the state’s version of events surrounding what happened to Terence.

The official finding from An Garda Síochána is that Terence died by suicide. But there’s no way he did that, his family insists.

“We believe in our hearts that Terence didn’t do that. We believe it was done to him,” says Sammy.

Since 2005, successive governments and justice ministers have denied the Wheelocks an independent public inquiry into Terence’s death. But they have continued to campaign, keeping it up for almost as long as he lived.

Now, they are petitioning Dublin city councillors to pass a motion of support for a public inquiry.

They would also like to see Diamond Park, a large green space on Gardiner Street, renamed after Terence, and a mural commissioned in his memory.

Hitting the streets

On 12 April, one week on from the coffee shop, Sammy, his nephew Dave, and five volunteers converge on the busy intersection of Parnell Street and Gardiner Street.

It’s 5.30pm on a Friday evening, and still light out under a gentle spring sun. A volunteer pulls clipboards from his rucksack, snaps on paper petitions, and hands them around.

Among the group are People Before Profit members, and other volunteers.

A woman with a black and white keffiyeh tied around her vivid red hair has turned up to help, but she is not yet certain what for.

“We’re collecting signatures for Terence Wheelock, ” says Sammy.

“Who?”

“My brother.”

For the first time of many that night, Sammy relays the details of his brother’s death.

All around the intersection, scooters snake through queues of cars. The woman keeps steady eye contact.

“I’m so sorry,” she finally says.

In the early 2000s and into the 2010s, the Wheelocks’ case was high-profile. Journalists, columnists, politicians, and human rights groups all weighed in.

Column after column was dedicated to the contested circumstances of Terence’s death and weak mechanisms of police accountability.

“Kids are dying in Garda custody. In Bertie’s constituency,” wrote ex-footballer Eamon Dunphy in an op-ed in the Daily Mail in June 2007, in which he bemoaned then-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s silence on the question of an independent public inquiry.

Politicians for the area at the time – Labour’s Joe Costello (then a TD), independent TD Tony Gregory, and Sinn Féin’s then MEP Mary Lou McDonald – all got behind the Wheelocks’ calls for an inquiry.

In 2006, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) pointed towards the case in a submission to the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture. Human rights group Amnesty International also flagged the case in its 2007 annual country-by-country report.

But after the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) in 2010 published the findings of its investigation into the death, the media attention quietened.

Nonetheless, the family and their supporters continued to host protests and vigils outside Store Street Garda Station and marched to the Department of Justice, in the stately surrounds of St Stephen’s Green.

On 12 April, the petitioners walked past Diamond Park, heading towards Gardiner Street flats. Below the gull-winged roof of the 1950s complex, a solitary gargoyle stared down with its face contorted, and mouth open wide.

Reddy, the People Before Profit representative and a family friend, follows a long spiral staircase up to a group of young men chatting loudly on the top balcony.

For a brief moment, the chatter falls silent. A volunteer mentions Terence’s name. They sign immediately.

“Everyone here knows about it already,” says Reddy. He raps on doors and stuffs pamphlets through letterboxes.

“It’s kind of taken on a new life,” he says, “and become a vessel for calls to reform the policing of working-class communities.”

The day

Sammy remembers the events around his younger brother’s arrest like it was yesterday, he says.

That day, Terence was redecorating his room, says Sammy.

He left the family home to buy a new paintbrush to neaten the edges of the walls, says Sammy. His mother, Esther, gave him €5 and told him to hurry home. She had food on for him.

Terence went out the back of the house, and bumped into some boys he knew, some of whom had stolen a car the night before. Within minutes, he was caught up in a Gardaí operation, which saw the young men surrounded and arrested.

Terence was taken to cell seven in Store Street Garda Station.

Around two and a half hours after, Terence was allegedly found unconscious in the cell with a ligature tied around his neck.

The ligature, fashioned out of the fabric cord from the waist of his tracksuit bottoms, was attached behind a cell buzzer, 4 foot 8 inches off the ground and sunken into the wall.

According to official Garda reports, when Terence was found, he was removed from his cell and brought into the hallway, where CPR was conducted on him.

Terence was transferred to the Mater Hospital.

At around 3.40pm that day, Sammy says, three guards called to the Wheelock family home, a pebble-dashed end of terrace on Sean O’Casey Avenue.

“They knocked on the door and just said, ‘Your son’s hung himself.’ There was no consideration, they didn’t ask to come in and sit down, or say we have something to express,” Sammy says.

Esther, his mother, who had a pre-existing heart condition, collapsed in the hall. Police took Sammy’s sister and his mother to St James’s Hospital, despite Terence being in the Mater, a mere seven minutes away from the family home.

The Wheelock family say they believe that this was a deliberate delaying tactic, done so Gardaí could confiscate Terence’s blood-stained clothes before the family could see them.

An inspector told GSOC that it had been a “genuine mistake”, with no intent to “mislead the family”.

“By the time my Dad and older brother Larry got there, they noticed one of the Guards walking out with Terence’s bloody clothes in a bag,” says Sammy. The family weren’t given them back for years, he says.

Dave Wheelock was 16 when his uncle Terence died. “It became our lives,” he says of the hospital visits that he and his family took to the Mater Hospital over the weeks that followed.

Terence remained in a coma in the ICU in the Mater Hospital. “The doctors said he wouldn’t last till Saturday, but he fought for three and a half months,” said Sammy. He died on 16 September 2005.

Contested events

In the aftermath of Terence’s death, the Wheelocks had a lot of unanswered questions – about how he was treated at the time of the arrest, about his access to a solicitor.

There were also several inconsistencies with Terence’s custody record — the official document that notes the minutiae of a prisoner’s experience while in custody.

“I could write a full novel just on these disputes alone,” says Sammy, looking into the distance.

Terence’s custody record noted only a birthmark and a bruise on his left arm upon admitting him, the GSOC report said.

Photos taken by the director of clinical photography at the Mater Hospital at the time show extensive bruising along Terence’s arms, legs, and elbows, along with marks on his hands, and a 2.5-inch graze on his lower back.

The custody record also notes that Terence was sleeping each time he was checked, at approximately 20-minute intervals, said Sammy. “It reads ‘prisoner asleep, all okay’, all the way down.”

On his final check, which happened around 35 minutes after the last one, a garda said she found Terence slumped on the floor, with a ligature around his neck.

“Think about it, you have a young kid, in for a crime he’d no involvement in. So he’s sleeping every time they check on him and then suddenly he wakes up and does that. Does that make sense to you?” says Sammy.

According to those interviewed by GSOC, which included gardaí and other witnesses, Terence was in good spirits the morning of the arrest, laughing and singing. He bought new clothes for a family event the following day and was looking forward to celebrating, says Sammy.

The cell where Terence was found was renovated just one day after the incident. This was done before the Wheelocks’ legal team could independently inspect it.

Gardaí told GSOC that the work had been done once the cell no longer needed to be preserved, and they had needed to repair it all to use the cell again.

It raised considerable suspicion among the family. “If it was all being investigated, then why was it cleaned up immediately?” says Sammy.

Terence’s t-shirt, tracksuit bottoms, and shorts were covered in blood and vomit, says Sammy. The blood, the GSOC report says, could have been from when medics inserted a line into his femoral artery as they tried to save Terence’s life. The vomit, the report reads, could have been from a previous incident, before Terence entered the cell. In both instances, the Wheelock family do not accept these accounts.

It took the family over a year of back and forth with the authorities to secure the clothing for their own testing.

The items were then taken away again only to be returned in 2020 after years of persistence by Sammy’s sister Orlaigh, 15 years after Terence’s death.

“The tracksuit bottoms still had the fiver for a paintbrush in one of the pockets,” said Sammy.

In 2007, an inquest into the cause of death took place at the Coroner’s Court. The jury of seven, split four/three, ultimately returned a verdict of death by suicide in Terence’s case.

“We were happy with the results because three didn’t believe. It wasn’t a unanimous decision,” says Sammy, noting that both the testimony from the family and the independent examiners’ reports were not allowed in court, although the latter was referred to.

Terence’s death predated the establishment of GSOC. But it was the first case ever investigated by the body, which produced its final report in 2010.

The ombudsman — whose remit is to establish if Garda misconduct took place — found that Terence was not mistreated while in Garda custody.

Instead, the report found that crucial processes were not followed, and “systemic failures” led to Terence having a ligature with him in the cell.

“The death of Terence Wheelock was a tragedy,” the first line of the conclusion reads.

St Mary’s Mansions

In St Mary’s Mansions, a newly refurbished flat complex on Seán McDermott Street, there’s the squeak of opening doors and yapping dogs.

As one door opens, a man in a wheelchair, with limited speech ability, appears.

As Sammy begins, the man puts his hands on the outside of his waist and pushes the air down, “he knew Terence when he was young”, says Sammy, who is handed the man’s identity card, and adds his name to the growing list.

The sentiment on the balconies is that of frustration. Some remember Terence as a young boy playing on the streets with their children, while others share unsavoury encounters with gardaí from the Store Street station.

“I remember the case,” says an older woman appearing at her door in black satin pyjamas and a towel wrapped tightly around her head. “Please God, I hope your ma sees justice.”

The Wheelock family has spoken publicly about Garda intimidation in the aftermath of Terence’s death, and their Justice for Terence campaign.

Sammy says that gardaí would station themselves outside the family home, “shining torches into our windows”, and trot down the avenue on horseback at 3am.

During the organisation of the first Justice for Terence march in 2005, Sammy says, his younger brother Gavin was stopped by gardaí for distributing pamphlets.

Within minutes, he says, gardaí were everywhere and ran through the Wheelocks’ house. “My sister was six months pregnant, she got smacked across the stomach and onto the floor,” he says.

Despite never being in trouble before, Sammy says he was routinely stopped by gardaí and searched.

An Garda Síochána did not respond to queries put to them about Terence’s clothes or the allegations of intimidation.

Ultimately, his mother decided to move from the family home. “She was afraid it was gonna happen next to one of us.

So she figured she had to get out of there,” he says, turning down the open stairwell of the flat complex.

Political buy-in

“What we’re trying to do, it’s just to bring it [the campaign] as close to the top of the agenda as it can possibly be,” says Reddy, the PBP Finglas representative, noting the upcoming local elections.

They are looking for the council to release a statement of support, he says, and write to Justice Minister Helen McEntee of Fine Gael to open an independent public inquiry.

Independent Councillor Christy Burke, who represents the north inner-city, says that while he would support such a motion, and has in the past, the council has limited authority in pushing things through. “You’ve more power in the headlights of your car.”

Janet Horner, a Green Party councillor who also represents the area, says she agrees. “I don’t find it a particularly powerful mechanism,” she says, noting that ministers routinely ignore motions.

“The best way about it is through the TDs,” says Burke.

Fiona Donson, senior lecturer in the School of Law at University College Cork, says that public inquiries were initially set up in Ireland to take certain matters out of the political sphere, but, ironically, they still require political buy-in.

Inquiries, “are set up when everything else has been tried and failed”, she says, “when we have people in pain, or systems breaking down, we need to have these.”

Donson says that Ireland doesn’t have a tradition of inquiries into miscarriages of justice in the same way as other jurisdictions. “We haven’t had inquiries into failures in the prison system either,” she says.

A spokesperson for McEntee, the Justice Minister, said by email that the department will not look into the possibility of an independent inquiry.

“As these matters have been fully considered by GSOC, and have also been the subject of legal proceedings, a further inquiry into Terence’s tragic death is not being considered,” they said.

The legal proceedings refer to a 2014 settlement, in which the Wheelock family won €42,000 after suing the state for negligence, with the state accepting no liability.

Pa Daly, Sinn Féin TD and party spokesperson on justice, said his party supports an inquiry. “Justice has been delayed, and therefore denied, to the Wheelock family for far too long.”

“A Sinn Féin government would establish an inquiry into Terence’s death and other historical injustices,” he said.

The campaign continues

Sammy stops to light a cigarette outside St Mary’s Mansions, before tackling the next lot of houses.

“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t hard,” he says, exhaling. “I relive it each time I explain it, the same emotions that I felt the day it happened.”

He catches himself before continuing. “But it has to be done,” he says.

“You see my brother Larry, this is his vessel,” he says “I’m just the one steering the ship.”

His older brother Larry and father Samuel (also known as Larry) started the campaign almost 19 years ago. Both of them have since passed away but pleaded with the family to keep fighting

His brother, on his deathbed, asked the family to continue the fight, says Sammy. “I promised him I wouldn’t let it go.”

Sammy is happy to lead the campaign, as most of his 10 other siblings have work and parenting. His kids are all grown up.

The other siblings help out in different ways, he says, managing the campaign’s Facebook page, marching in organised protests, and speaking with journalists occasionally.

Although Sammy credits his brother and father with teaching him the ropes, he now brings his personality to the campaign. These days he sits in his room, often late at night coming up with campaign slogans and graphics, trying any means to keep Terence’s name in the public domain.

“I’ll get the odd text at 2am, an idea for a new campaign angle,” says Reddy, the family friend.

Sammy’s next venture? TikTok. In an effort to reach a new generation, he’s downloaded video editing software and is keen to experiment.

“Terence’s case came before social media. Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if it was around when all this happened,” he says.

In the past few years, there’s been some renewed interest in the campaign.

R&B artist Gemma Dunleavy routinely dedicates a segment of her show to Terence. Both the late academic Vicky Conway, who hosted the podcast Policed, and the popular Talking Bollix podcast have highlighted the case.

It’s encouraging, says Sammy, to see new people get involved and get behind the family. He puts out a cigarette and begins to walk towards the next flat complex, where some of the volunteers have already started knocking.

“My dad said it years ago: ‘I will fight this to my last breath.’ And that he did. And my brother Larry did the same,” he says. “I have no intention of walking away. Until my last breath, until I get to the truth.”