Kiea McCann's parents tell of arriving at scene of crash in Prime Time interview
Tragic teenager Kiea, 17, died in a horrific crash along with her best friend Dlava Mohamed, 16, as driver Anthony McGinn, who was bringing them to their debs ball, ignored their pleas to slow down and struck a tree at Legnakelly, Co Monaghan on July 31, 2023.
In an interview on RTÉ's Prime Time on Tuesday night, the parents of Kiea, Teresa and Frankie McCann shared the joy that was felt in the household as their daughter prepared for her debs night.
Kiea's loving mother Teresa said: 'Getting ready that morning, me and Kiea, of course, she was above in the bedroom, and I'm downstairs, waiting for her and we're taxing each other, back and forward. I said, 'Come on, time to get the makeup done'.
'They were so excited about it,' her beloved father Frankie added.
Frankie shared the tragic moment he and Teresa arrived at the scene of the crash. 'We got there, and we seen the car had hit the tree and had spun around, so we did,' he told Prime Time.
'So I said to Teresa, 'You hold back'. And I jumped the fence…. 'You won't want to come down here for a minute,' I said. 'I'll check is the kids all right'.
'So when I went down, I get in through the side window and Anthony McGinn had a hold of my daughter like that there, and he says to me, 'Frankie, Kiea, Frankie, Kiea', and I never spoke to him, so I didn't, and I started doing compressions on her.
'So after that, we were waiting for the fire brigades and ambulances, it just seemed like an eternity.
'So eventually, when they came, I helped to cut the doors off and cut the girls down, and then it was just a rush job from jumping from my own daughter to Dlava. Just trying basically to save one to get to the other.
'It wasn't something you had a choice to do, it was something you had to do. Then you'd turn around, you'd see the mother lying with your own daughter.
'So eventually, when we knew there was nothing coming, the doctors landed and the whole lot. We got the girls beside each other. When they were in the car, they were holding hands when they were gone, and we knew they were gone instantly.
'And then when you look back on the road and you see the rest of your kids stand on the road and them screaming and panicking.'
Frankie gave the two girls their last rites himself. 'There's nobody else there to do it,' he shared. 'If anything, you kind of hope, if there is something after life, they would know that you were with them. You know, they'd know that they were loved. Because my daughter knew she was loved.'
Frankie told Prime Time that the sentence Anthony was handed was too lenient, sharing that while Anthony can receive visits, if they want to visit their child, 'it's a graveyard'.
Frankie said: 'To believe that the man that was asked to stop and refused, in my eyes and in the mother's eyes, what we seen on the night, if the DPP or the judge or somebody had to go through all that trauma that we went through and seen it, it would be a different story.
'You just can't live life like that, and then to go into a court and to hear he gets seven years. Why not turn around and give five years for my daughter? Give five years for the Dlava, two years for Avin.
'That's 12 years that a judge could have given, consecutive years. He could have give that, not turn around and say, will it? He's getting three meals a day. He's getting visits. Me and her want to visit our daughter, it's a graveyard. Speak to a stone.'
Teresa said they trusted Anthony to bring the girls safely to the debs, and that the sentence he received was not fair.
'To me, it's not a fair sentence,' Teresa said. 'At the end of the day, he knew what he was at when he got into that car. He knew he was meant to bring them kids to their Debs. He knew he was meant to drive them safe. We trusted that.'
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