Woman who died in Connemara house fire named as former US death row inmate Sunny Jacobs

Irish Times

2 days ago

A woman who spent five years on death row in the
United States
is one of the victims of the fire in Connemara which killed two people.
Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs
spent 16 years in a Florida prison over the murder of two police officers.
She was named locally in Connemara as a victim of the fire, along with a man in his 30s who has not yet been publicly identified.
Jacobs was in a car with her partner Jesse Tafero and her two children, aged 9 years and 10 months, when she became caught up in a fatal shooting incident at an Interstate 95 rest stop in 1976.
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Jacobs and Tafero were sentenced to death while a third man, Walter Rhodes, who was in the back seat of the car, later confessed to the murder.
Tafero was executed in 1990. Ms Jacobs was eventually acquitted in 1992 and released from jail.
On a visit to Ireland in 1998 while she was campaigning at an Amnesty International event for the abolition of the death penalty, she met Irishman Peter Pringle.
He had been sentenced to death in Ireland for the murder o
f
gardas John Morley and Henry Byrne during a bank robbery in Ballaghaderreen in July 1980. His death sentence, along with that of two other men, was commuted to 40 years in jail.
Mr Pringle was acquitted of the killing at the Court of Appeal in 1995 after the court ruled the original verdict was unsafe and unsound.
The couple married in 2012 and they moved to Connemara. Mr Pringle died in 2023.
In 2008, Ms Jacobs published the bestselling book Stolen Time about her period in jail.
Tuesday' fire broke out at a cottage near Casla, a village between Inverin and Carraroe, at about 6am.
'At approximately 6:20am, gardaí and fire services were alerted to a house fire at Gleann Mhic Mhuireann,' An Garda Síochána said in a statement.
'The fire was brought under control by Fire Services and the bodies of a woman aged in her 70s and a man in his 30s were recovered from inside the house.'
A forensic examination of the cottage, of which the two deceased are believed to have been the only occupants of at the time, is being carried out.
The bodies have been transported to the University Hospital Galway mortuary to undergo postmortems and the coroner has been notified.
'The results of the postmortems, along with the findings of the technical examination, will determine the course of the Garda investigation,' the Garda added.
Three units of the County Galway Fire Service and fire personnel from Galway city attended the scene.
An Garda Síochána is appealing to anyone with information about the incident to contact Clifden Garda station on 095 22500, the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111 or any garda station.