Death row survivor Sonia ‘Sunny' Jacobs found ‘tranquility' in Connemara before death in house fire

Irish Times

2 days ago

Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs and her husband Peter Pringle lived out their lives in a place of breathtaking beauty and isolation.
Each morning when they opened their curtains they had views of the blue-tinged
Twelve Pins mountain range
, rocky bogland and Lough Glenicmurrin.
The 1970s-era bungalow where Ms Jacobs (76) and her caretaker Kevin Kelly (31) died in a house fire in the early hours of Tuesday morning is down a rough boreen. The area is now closed off with Garda tape.
It seems scarcely believable that a woman who overcame so much in her life would succumb to the tragedy of a house fire along with a young man who had his whole life ahead of him.
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Woman who died in Connemara house fire named as former US death row inmate Sunny Jacobs
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Sonny Jacobs pictured at the Cuirt International Festival of Literature in 2007. Photograph: Joe O'Shaughnessy.
Ms Jacobs spent five years on death row in Florida and 16 years in prison for a murder she did not commit. While she was in prison, her parents, who were looking after her two children, were killed in a plane crash.
She was released in 1992. Six years later, at a meeting organised by Amnesty International in Galway, she met Peter Pringle. He had also been on death row in Ireland for the murder of gardaí John Morley and Henry Byrne in July 1980. He too was exonerated having spent 14 years in jail.
They moved twice in Connemara before settling in Glenicmurrin at the end of a row of about a dozen houses. The nearest town, Costelloe, is 15 minutes drive away.
Despite their isolation, they regularly received visitors mostly in connection with the Sunny Centre, which she set up with Mr Pringle to campaign against the death penalty worldwide. Mr Pringle died in December 2023 and Ms Jacobs's beloved dog, Barney, died a short time after that.
Postman Michael Leainde got to know the couple better than most. 'People are really shocked and it is only now they are coming to grips with what happened,' he said.
'She was very witty. I'd be talking to her every second day. If I said something and she didn't think it was right, she would say, 'Michael, you were wrong about that'. She was a great woman and we had great chats,' he said.
Postman Michael Leainde got to know the couple better than most.
Photograph: Ronan McGreevy
He thought she and her husband found a happiness in the landscape of Connemara that had denied to them for so long in their lives.
'If you look around you, you have peace and tranquillity. When you get a little bit older in age, you want to have some peace in life. They really appreciated what they had here,' she said.
Mr Leainde, who is also a local councillor, spoke to her last Thursday and said she was in great form. She had spoken to her son recently via video call, he recalled.
A neighbour, Michael Walsh, said he knew her husband Mr Pringle very well and he would call in occasionally. They were a happy couple who moved to the location in their final years to the house their final location locally having rented an adjacent house for many years.
She was a 'nice woman. We all felt sorry for her for all the years she spent in prison', he said.
Ruairí McKiernan, a former member of the Council of State, a body that advises the president of Ireland, first met Ms Jacobs 18 years ago and they became good friends.
Despite being 76, she worked until the end of her life talking, podcasting and advocating for the Sunny Foundation in the United States, he said in an online tribute.
'She never stopped giving, and, in all of this, she kept gratitude at the heart of her practice. Always grateful for beauty, for animals, for nature, for friendship, for life,' he said.