A 53 year-old Ferns native who spent many years living in Enniscorthy has been sentenced to life in prison for murdering a 41 year-old on whom he stamped repeatedly before attempting to burn him after the deceased beat him in an arm wrestle.

“I frightened myself, I was like an animal,” Liam Power, now listed as being of no fixed abode told gardaí.

The Central Criminal Court trial heard that Latvian man Gints Intembergs was found dead on his kitchen floor in Co Carlow on the morning of September 16th, 2014.

Power had pleaded not guilty to murder on that or the previous day, but he pleaded guilty to manslaughter at the deceased man’s home in Graigowen, Tullow. He had also pleaded not guilty to assault causing harm on another man, Aigar Sildars on the same occasion, a charge which he was cleared of the day previously.

Power told his landlady that the deceased had beaten him in an arm wrestling match and had said: “You’re not such a big man now”, slapping him across the face.
He told her he had hit the deceased over the head with an ashtray and had kept kicking him in the head and face.

“I was in Tullow last night. Things got out of control. I kicked the head off him. Look at my runners,” he said when arrested. “Sh*t happens and I lost the head. What can I do? That’s all I can say.”

His garda interviews were delayed due to him being so intoxicated; he said he had drunk about 16 cans of cider and smoked crack cocaine in the hours before the killing.

When he was interviewed, he said he had hit Mr Intembergs a ‘haymaker on the chin’, causing him to fall to the floor. He said he then kicked him 10 or 11 times while he was on the floor, before removing the victim’s clothes.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said.
He said he used a lighter to try to set fire to the hair on the man’s ‘privates’.
“I was off my head,” he replied, when asked why he wanted to burn him.
Power said he had also kicked Mr Sildars, who was in the sitting-room. He said the attack on both men lasted 20 minutes and that he went back and forth from the kitchen to the sitting-room, kicking them both.

For more on this story, see this week’s Echo.

Liam Power at Enniscorthy District Courthouse in 2005. Pic: John Walsh