Martha Nolan-O'Slatarra: family of Irish woman found dead on New York yacht ‘have a lot of questions'
Ms Nolan O'Slatarra's mother, Elma, and sister Jacqui, from Co
Carlow
, as well as several other family members, have travelled to the US to begin the repatriation process. It is understood they are seeking a second postmortem examination to establish a cause of death.
Ms Nolan-O'Slatarra was pronounced dead at the scene in the early hours of August 5th after emergency medical responders and East Hampton police arrived at the exclusive yacht club.
Good Samaritans had attempted to resuscitate her unconscious body.
READ MORE
What happened to Martha Nolan O'Slattara? The Irish entrepreneur found dead in New York
Listen |
14:37
Suffolk County Police said an autopsy 'did not show evidence of violence, and her final cause of death is pending further examination'.
It is understood a final postmortem examination report will take at least three months to prepare. Funeral arrangements are to be published later this week, her
RIP.ie
death notice indicated.
While the Suffolk County Police Department had initially said homicide detectives were investigating the death, two days later they said there was no evidence to suggest foul play and ruled out that line of investigation.
Arthur Aidala, a New York city-based criminal defence attorney who is representing the deceased's family, said any discussion of Ms Nolan-O'Slatarra's cause of death 'is irresponsible', 'not accurate' and 'just speculation'.
[
Questions remain over Martha Nolan-O'Slatarra's death on Long Island yacht
Opens in new window
]
He told local reporters her family 'had a sit down with the Suffolk County homicide detectives', who were conducting 'a deep investigation' into the matter.
'People are still being questioned, there are technological analyses that [are] still being done,' he said.
'The family request respect for their privacy' at this time and 'want to honour Martha's legacy,' he said.
Ms Nolan-O'Slatarra (33) was an entrepreneur who established East x East, a luxury designer sunglasses and swimwear brand, after emigrating to the US in 2015.
She was originally from Monacurragh, just outside Carlow town, and a past pupil of St Leo's College, Carlow.
[
Irish woman found dead on New York yacht was successful entrepreneur
Opens in new window
]
She earned a degree in commerce from University College Dublin and a master's in digital marketing from the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School.
Local councillor Fergal Browne said she was 'from a long-established and highly respected farming family'. Taoiseach Micheál Martin described Ms Nolan-O'Slatarra as 'a young, beautiful, very talented, creative woman'.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Opposition must be wary of slating Trump's Washington DC crackdown
My sister is having a bad summer. Even as I'm typing this, Peggy is at [Washington] DC police headquarters. We had dinner in Georgetown recently and when we came back to my house, where her car was parked, she was short a Buick. Two polite officers who responded to our call said they could do little, amid a rash of brazen car thefts by teenagers. READ MORE One officer said that even if they saw the perp driving her car, they could not chase him because of laws passed by the DC council. Kids – some too young to drive legally – can just hot-wire cars to go home. Two 15-year-olds are charged in a carjacking attack on a former DOGE [department of government efficiency] employee who helped set off US president Donald Trump 's crusade on crime in the district. The council has been notoriously lax toward juvenile offenders. Peggy had always loved that Buick, which she bought because Peyton Manning was the pitchman. We figured we'd never see it again. The next morning, though, an officer from Prince George's County, a working-class Maryland suburb, banged on her door. Her car was found in a park, running and nearly out of gas. When she collected it, after paying a $215 (€214) towing charge, she found an odoriferous collection: half-eaten pizza, soda cans, fast-food wrappers, a used condom and a couple of debit cards. She called police to tell them about the debit cards, thinking they could help trace the thieves. (Our dad, after all, was a DC cop.) But officers said to throw them away, noting that the cardholders had probably already gotten new ones. Peggy got the car detailed and celebrated its return by going shopping at Bloomingdale's. When she got back to her parking space, someone had T-boned the poor Buick [collided with the car]. [ Genteel streets of Washington's Georgetown meet national guard in Trump's crime crackdown Opens in new window ] Then, icing on the cake, she got more than $1,800 worth of speed-camera tickets that the car thieves had racked up going 70 in 25mph (40km/h) zones, and some for running red lights. One ticket revealed that the car was stolen just after she got out of it, at 7pm, still light outside. For all we know, the thieves watched her get out. She had to go down to headquarters on Friday to get the police report so she could appeal the tickets. It's hardly the most heinous crime, but you hear a lot about Washingtonians and their personal experiences of being preyed upon. City officials and many liberal residents are outraged about Trump's painting the district as a hellscape and flooding the zone with law enforcement and troops. Protesters around town held up signs reading 'Fascists' and a department of justice employee (now fired) threw a Subway sandwich at an officer and was charged with assault. It's ridiculous to drag FBI agents from their desks to be cops on the beat. And the tableau of national guard troops – even unarmed – raises the spectre of martial law being normalised and weaponised. (Armed and masked border patrol agents showing up at a Gavin Newsom gerrymandering speech in Los Angeles was disturbing.) It is also true that many district residents are secretly glad to see more uniforms. No matter what statistics say, they don't feel safe. I've always been hypervigilant. My mom, the wife of a policeman, passed down a healthy paranoia. She drove me to move into my dorm at Catholic University with a butcher knife on the seat between us. She gave me a Chinese letter opener with written instructions on how to find the jugular. At Christmas, there was always a can of pepper spray or a whistle among the presents. I find myself packing pepper spray again. I feel more wary walking around the city. It's disturbing to ask someone to unlock the Claritin at CVS because the police don't lock up the smash-and-grabbers. Drugstores, as Bill Maher said, have become a 'zoo for teeth-whitening strips'. Trump is playing the saviour on crime when he's the biggest scofflaw [law breaker] in town – first inciting the mob on January 6th and then pardoning felons who broke into the Capitol and beat up police officers. Elie Honig, a CNN legal analyst and author of the forthcoming book, When You Come at the King: Inside DOJ's Pursuit of the President, From Nixon to Trump, summed up the dilemma. 'Yes, Trump is hypocritical and scattershot on public safety,' he told me. 'And yes, he's likely doing this as a flex. But he happens to be within the law here and he happens to be right.' [ Trump sends troops into Washington DC: distraction tactic or part of wider policy? Opens in new window ] While the district's homicide rate has fallen, it's almost as high as New York City's at its most dangerous, in 1990. In the Atlantic, Michael Powell noted that the reality of crime is grimmest in Wards 7 and 8, the disadvantaged, majority-Black neighbourhoods where more than half of the district's homicides occurred last year. 'I have no doubt that Trump enjoys targeting Democratic-controlled cities for embarrassment,' Powell writes. 'I also have little doubt that a mother in Ward 8 might draw comfort from a National Guard soldier standing watch near her child's school.' The diva of distraction is putting on a show. ( They're eating the cats and the dogs!) But progressives should not fall into Trump's trap and downplay crime, once more getting on the wrong side of an inflammatory issue. As with inflation, they should remember that personal experiences can count more than sanguine statistics. Even if Trump is being diabolical, Democrats should not pretend that everything is fine here. Because it's not. This article originally appeared in The New York Times .
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Brooklyn shooting: Three people killed and eight wounded, police say
Three people were killed and eight others wounded when multiple gunmen opened fire inside a crowded Brooklyn hookah lounge and restaurant early Sunday morning, according to authorities. Police officers responded to reports of a shooting inside the Taste of the City lounge in Crown Heights just before 3.30am, New York police department (NYPD) commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said at a press briefing later Sunday. The three people who were killed were all men and were all pronounced dead at the scene. Two were aged 27 and 35, and it was not immediately known how old the third person killed was, police said. Of 11 victims, Ms Tisch added, eight were men and three were women. Their known ages ranged from 27 to 61. READ MORE The eight wounded victims – five men and three women – were taken to local hospitals with what police said were non-life threatening injuries. 'We have multiple shooters involved in this shooting,' Ms Tisch said Sunday. 'We have recovered at least 36 shell casings.' Officers had recovered one weapon near the scene of the shooting. But investigators had not immediately identified or detained any suspects. Ms Tisch made it a point to say New York City had registered 'the lowest number of shooting incidents and shooting victims seven months in the year … on record'. Nonetheless, 'it's a terrible thing that's happened', she said. 'It's a terrible shooting,' Ms Tisch said. 'There's no other way to describe it'. Taste of the City Lounge, located less than a half mile from the historic Brooklyn Museum, pened three years ago and was the scene of another shooting in November 2024. That earlier case was non-fatal. As of Sunday, there had been more than 270 mass shootings in the US this year – or 1.18 a day, according to the non-partisan Gun Violence Archive. The online resource defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are wounded or killed. The US's perennially high rates of such shootings have prompted calls from some in the country for more substantial gun control. But Congress has largely been unable or unwilling to heed those calls. – Guardian
Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Irish Times
Donald Trump's Washington ‘crime crackdown' has so far met with a sandwich thrown in resistance. Will it end there?
Residents of Georgetown, the redbrick, hushed, window-boxed confection of ideal living framed around its historic university campus and the deathless legacy of a young tousled-haired senator from Massachusetts , were surprised to see members of the National Guard patrolling their neighbourhood . But there they were, striding along M Street. What could be happening on the mean streets of Georgetown, they wondered? Civil unrest among the ubiquitous line of teenage customers waiting in line to get into Brandi Melville? A marathon debate over a reserved parking spot between two professors in the philosophy faculty? One of the unfair myths about Georgetown is that the 1970s community declined the city's plans to dig a Metro tunnel when the network was being extended in order to keep the neighbourhood just so. Many papers and articles have been written explaining that the truth was more complex: the hardness of the rock; an insufficient population to justify the need. Either way, Georgetown has no Metro line and therefore remains slightly apart not just from Washington, DC, but on dreamier days – when the petals are strewn on its redbrick streets and the taverns and restaurants, sun-kissed and blessed – from reality itself. It is a living, breathing dream machine. READ MORE On March 17th last year, the White House prepared for what turned out to be president Joe Biden's final come-all-ye for the Irish in the green room. It was a Saturday so the hot spots around Adams Morgan and Connecticut Avenue were busy with green-clad revellers for 'St Patty's Day'. But the local news reports carried a story that seemed shockingly local key. Seven people had been shot in a late night mass-shooting incident at a city centre apartment complex. Two were dead, five were wounded. The story was a footnote in the local networks and did not feature nationally. A protester holds a sign and follows members of the National Guard as they patrol Union Station in Washington DC. Photograph: Kent Nishimura/The New York Times What made the shooting stand out is that it occurred in the northwest of the city. Washingtonians are quite upfront about the demarcation lines within the city, with the wards of north and west essentially cocooned from the deprived neighbourhoods to the south and east of the city riven by shootings and drug-related crimes and civilian safety issues. By late 2023 stories of indiscriminate carjackings, occurring even in Georgetown, were worrying residents and the news networks alike. The gentrification of neighbourhoods such as Shaw, in the heart of downtown, and parts around the Capitol were juxtaposed with interviews of the incoming residents who reported accounts of late night gunfire and antisocial behaviour. None of the sales brochures had carried news of this. It left long-term Washingtonians fearing a return to the worst years of the early 1990s: the city was the murder capital, as well as the official capital of the US in 1991, with 482 murders. As national attention became riveted to the presidential election last year, Donald Trump issued many dark proclamations about the city and promised to clear it up when he returned. Meanwhile, the city's administrative and metropolitan police force began to get to grips with the issue. The crime statistics fell dramatically. Some 273 people were killed in 2023; by the end of 2024, that had fallen to 187 homicides. But as Megan McArdle pointed out in her Washington Post column, that still represents about 27 people for every 100,000 residents. It's an alarmingly high figure compared with other big east coast cities – in Boston the ratio is 3.7 per 100,000 residents and in New York, another city president Trump likes to depict as out of control, it is 4.7. Members of the National Guard pose for a selfie outside Union Station in Washington, DC. Photograph: Andrew Leyden/Getty The declaration of a citywide emergency by Trump this week, and the arrival of uniformed National Guard and FBI agents and an assortment of other law-enforcement agents, has provoked a strange response. Street protests by residents have been vocal but limited. The image of a lone white man in summer wear repeatedly yelling 'fascist' at uniformed patrolmen before hurling his Subway sandwich at the guardsman and then sprinting away into the night spoke volumes about the pure weirdness of this moment. The uniformed figure was, of course, doing his job, as he had been ordered to do. Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, took to X to gravely confirm that the protester had been charged with a felony, provoking both disgust and mirth. For what? Illegal use of a Spicy Italian? In a final twist, it emerged that the protester was an employee of the Department of Justice. On Wednesday night the first big push by the newly bolstered Washington law enforcement troops called into the city by Trump, there were 45 criminal arrests for assault, illegal drugs and narcotics, including three possessions of illegal firearms. Many people will welcome the removal of these threats from the streets – even if the overall figure seems low for a city under a state of civil emergency. The worry is that by day 25, Washingtonians could find themselves apprehended for flicking a cigarette butt into the gutter. A jogger who said 'thank you!' as he passed members of the National Guard outside Union Station in Washington, DC. Photograph: Kent Nishimura/The New York Times The broader questions – as to whether this is simply a 30-day distraction, or whether Trump will make good on his intention to call for an extension of the thirty-day limit, or whether this is the first intimation of a hitherto unimaginable authoritarian police era – drift through the hectic days. As ever with Trump, it is impossible to predict. But if it is the start of a plan to draft in federal enforcement to other big cities across the United States, then a sandwich hurled in frustration will be the least of it.
